Until a couple of centuries ago, if “you managed to overrun a people, you got to take their stuff. It was straightforward. What else was war for? … In modern warfare, however, plunder is very taboo.” But undoing the plunder of earlier generations is complicated: “Who owns these things to begin with? The state? Can the current Italian government lay claim to a Roman statue that left the country decades ago under the watch of a much less conscientious leader?”