Thanks to recent international pacts that condemn the smuggling of artifacts, there's been an ethics shift that seems to favor the claims from countries of origin. No sooner had Philippe de Montebello, the Met's director, signed away the Euphronios Krater than he launched into a series of passionate speeches: why, he asked, should objects from ancient civilizations go back to modern nations that didn't exist when the art was created? Yes, the law 'must be obeyed,' he said, but antiquities 'are the patrimony of all mankind.' In other words, who really owns the past? But the pursuit of such artworks has ignited a complex debate over cultural patrimony.

Disputes about ancient treasures are nothing new-the Greeks have been trying to take back the Elgin Marbles from Britain for almost 200 years. Other countries, including Greece, Egypt and Peru, are also fighting for the restitution of art. In fact, the Met is returning 20 other pieces with checkered pasts, and museums from Boston to Los Angeles are negotiating with Italy over objects in their collections. Still, reporters who tried to nail down the krater's past took to calling it 'the hot pot.' For years, antiquities buyers operated on a 'don't ask, don't tell' standard. Hoving suspected that story was dubious, but Hecht provided documentation. The American dealer who sold it to the Met, Robert Hecht, said he got it from a guy in Beirut who'd kept it in a shoe box in a closet.

The true provenance of the krater wasn't exactly a surprise. Next year the Met is sending it back to Italy for good.

When the museum debuts its lavish new Greek and Roman galleries next month, its most notable antiquity will be left in a side gallery. It was stolen-dug up by looters from an Etruscan tomb near Rome and smuggled out of Italy just months before it was sold, an inconvenient truth the Met finally copped to last year. Thomas Hoving, then the Met's director, was so smitten by its classic beauty he called it 'positively the finest work of art I've ever seen.' (Take that, Michelangelo.) But the 2,500-year-old krater did have one major flaw. The krater-a 12-gallon pot for mixing wine and water-was one of only two dozen surviving examples by the great painter Euphronios, and it even had his signature. In 1972, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a record-smashing $1 million for an ancient Greek vase known as the Euphronios Krater.

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