We should build more memorials to controversial people

I have been making the best of lockdown by reading properly, from start to finish, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a seven-volume edition that is less daunting than it sounds, when you consider how addictive his rolling prose is. I have just reached the point, near the end of the great work, where Gibbon describes the sack of Constantinople by the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The blind Doge of Venice had persuaded the crusaders to interrupt what was supposed to be an attack on Muslim Alexandria by diverting to the Byzantine capital, where Venetian merchants had a large number of grievances to settle. Gibbon lists the marvellous classical statues, many of bronze, that were melted down by the victors and turned into coins for everyday use. He points out that some of these statues, made for the ancient Greeks, portrayed pagan gods. In the early days of Constantinople, when Christianity was engaged in a struggle against pagan opponents who hoped to keep the temples of the old religion open, these gods were seen as the enemy, albeit one that did not actually exist. Even so, the statues of the gods were not just preserved but proudly placed in prominent positions not far from Emperor Justinian’s great cathedral of Hagia Sophia. The Venetians, with a better aesthetic sense than their crusader allies, carried off the two bronze horses from the hippodrome of Constantinople, and placed them above the portico of the doge’s immodestly vast chapel, better known as the Basilica of St Mark, where they can still be found (though they have now been moved indoors to avoid pollution).

​These, then, were monuments to a pagan past that was roundly condemned by the Christians of Constantinople; but no one thought of taking them down before 1204.