Romantic as are the Egyptian discoveries, amazing as the work of
Layard remains, the discovery of Troy ranks as the most amazing
and romantic of all. The excavation of Troy is, indeed, an epic,
interwoven with boyish dreams, the pictures in a book, dire poverty,
and a gallant struggle for fortune. While Layard’s lifework was
largely inspired by the _Tales of the Arabian Nights_, Heinrich
Schliemann, who excavated Troy, found his inspiration in Homer.
When the pastor of the hamlet of Neu Buckow in Mecklenburg Schwerin
gazed for the first time on his new-born son in 1822, he little knew
what strange experiences confronted the boy. A year or two passed,
and the boy grew to love the stories of the Greek heroes of old that
his father used to pour into his eager ear. Heinrich Schliemann was
enraptured, transported with delight. To him the stories were real,
the deeds which Homer sang were true. The gift of a book showing the
burning of Troy set all doubts at rest in the boy’s mind. He saw
Troy itself being devoured by flames, the people fleeing for their
lives.
“I’m going to find Troy,” he said to his little playfellows.
They laughed at him, and he drew aside, rather hurt, unable to
understand why they did not share his enthusiasm. Then a little girl
joined him, listened to his tales of Troy and of how he was going to
set out one day to find it.
“I’ll help you,” she said.
The little boy remembered. Years afterwards he returned to her, but
she had forgotten and married another.
Desolation came on the home, and the boy was driven to face life in
a grocer’s shop. For eighteen hours a day he expended his boyish
strength in the services of the grocer, sweeping out the shop,
cleaning the windows, doing menial tasks for which he had not the
slightest inclination. While customers were demanding salt herrings
of him at the counter, he was dreaming of Helen of Troy, and as he
patted the butter his thoughts followed the adventures of Ulysses,
saw him sailing ’twixt Scylla and Charybdis, heard the sirens calling
to his hero.
It was a desperately hard life for the boy. His spirit rebelled, but
he could do nothing to escape. He was the creature of circumstance,
a grocer’s boy who dreamed of Homer while serving a litre of milk.
Continual contact with customers who were rough, crude, uneducated,
gradually drove from his mind the little Latin and learning of
earlier days. Loving knowledge, he yet had no time to acquire it.
What opportunity was there for a boy to learn while working eighteen
hours a day?
Schliemann was one of the shop slaves of last century. His life was
sheer drudgery all the time, just drudgery and a few hours of sleep
for the exhausted frame; no pleasure, no holidays, only work.
Through all his misery sometimes flashed the memories of the happy
days when his father used to delight him with the tales of Greek
heroes. Somehow, in spite of everything, he retained a glimmer of
hope, although he could see no way out of his environment. From dawn
to long after dark he was selling food for the body and craving food
for the mind. That childish picture of the burning of Troy was as
a beacon to him, often nearly overwhelmed, but always flickering
up again in his imagination. Buried deep down in him was still the
determination to find Troy.
It was growing dusk one day when a drunken miller lurched into the
shop, and suddenly began to recite in Greek some passages from Homer.
Schliemann was transfixed with amazement. The meaning of the words
was lost to him, but the beauty of the lines, their music, entered
his soul.
“Say it again,” he said eagerly to the miller.
The miller repeated the passages, and Schliemann, feeling in his
pocket for coppers, bought a glass of spirits to reward the drunkard.
“Again,” said Schliemann, and gave the man another glass of spirits
to induce him to repeat the lines.
Even then the grocer’s boy was not satisfied. He fumbled in his
pocket and produced his last coppers, the only wealth he owned in
the world, and with them bought a third glass of spirits so that he
might hear the lines from Homer once more. Imagine the tragedy of
it, a grocer’s boy giving everything he possessed just to hear a
drunken miller—the son of a clergyman—recite Homer to him in Greek.
One clergyman’s son a grocer, weeping because he loved Homer and
could not speak Greek, the other clergyman’s son drinking to drown
his misery because he knew Greek and Homer, and was condemned to be a
miller.
Bitter tears flowed down the boy’s face. He hungered for learning,
but his intellect was starved. Every night, utterly wearied with the
day’s work, he went down on his knees beside his bed, and prayed to
God that he might live to learn Greek. To the poor grocer’s boy, life
could hold no greater boon.
What at the time seemed his crowning misfortune proved in the end to
be his way of escape. Straining one day to lift a big cask, a sharp
fit of coughing brought his exertions to a sudden end. There was
blood on his lips and despair in his heart. Work in the shop was no
longer possible.
The lad knew not what to do. Ill, without money, he drifted to
Hamburg. No one would employ him in his weak state, and at last
in desperation he shipped as a cabin boy in a vessel bound for
Venezuela. A storm brought the ship to disaster, and for hours the
crew faced death in an open boat before being cast on the Dutch coast.
The darkest days in Schliemann’s life followed, days when he was
compelled to beg to keep body and soul together. A poorly paid
situation in an office revived hope in the breast of the shipwrecked
lad. Renting a garret at eighteenpence a week, he nearly starved
himself in order to buy books for study. Less than a shilling a day
sufficed to pay his rent and keep him alive.
No longer could his hunger for education be denied. Always he had
a book with him, every minute found him studying. If he waited in
a shop, out would come his book from his pocket; had he to walk on
an errand down the street, then he walked with an open book in his
hand. In six months he learned English; during the next six months he
mastered French.
He was mad to learn. His whole soul craved for knowledge. All
the unknown powers of his undeveloped brain began to awaken.
He possessed a genius for learning languages which was almost
unparalleled. With every language he learned, the next came easier.
In the following six months he mastered Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish
and Italian. His memory, which previously was bad, became remarkably
retentive, as is proved by this wonderful feat.
He did not stop to rest. His thoughts turned to Russian, and
his method of learning it was not without a touch of humour. A
better-paid post provided money to pay a teacher, so he scoured
the city on his quest. He hunted here, there and everywhere. In
all Amsterdam was not a single teacher of Russian, not a soul who
understood a word of the language.
Schliemann, thrown back on himself, unearthed an old Russian grammar
and dictionary and began to study the language alone. In less than
a week he learned the alphabet, and soon he was writing simple
exercises in Russian. Somehow his progress did not please him, he
felt the monotony of working alone. To lessen this monotony he hit on
the plan of hiring some one to listen to his Russian recitations for
the sum of sixpence a night. Every evening he declaimed in Russian
to the listener. The listener, understanding not a word, sat and was
shouted at by Schliemann.
As the listener was paid to listen, he could not object. It was
otherwise, however, with Schliemann’s landlords. They were not paid
to listen, and they objected strongly to the noise their lodger made,
so strongly that he was asked to find other lodgings because of the
annoyance he created. If the landlords thought to stop his studies
in this way, they were mistaken. Twice Schliemann was driven to new
lodgings, but he calmly continued his studies, and in six weeks was
writing letters in Russian.
By the time he was twenty-four, this amazing young man was sent on
business to Russia, and within a year he was starting in business
there for himself, fully determined to make a fortune so that he
could travel and realize the dreams of his childhood.
The remarkable thing is that the man who revered Greece and
everything Greek should spend his energies in learning so many other
tongues to the exclusion of the language of his beloved Homer. The
truth is that he, who had the gift of languages, was afraid to learn
Greek. He dared not trust himself to begin. The desire implanted
by the befuddled miller had grown stronger with the years, and
Schliemann, knowing the potent spell the language cast over him,
feared that once he began to study Greek, he would neglect his
business altogether, and never make the fortune which was to set him
free to wander in the land of Homer.
He threw himself into his business just as he had thrown himself
into his studies, and for years all his energies were concentrated
to one end, that of making money. Once, when Memel was burned down,
he gave himself up as ruined. His fortune was locked up in a cargo
of indigo at the docks, and all the dock warehouses were a smoking
mass. Hours later he learned that as the stone warehouses were choked
so full of goods, his indigo had been stored in a wooden shed some
distance away, and the direction of the wind had saved the shed. It
was an ill wind for Memel, but it trebled Schliemann’s fortune.
In ten short years his industry and exceptional ability, coupled with
the Crimean War, brought him the fortune he had planned. He, a young
man of thirty-five, was free to order his life as he chose. He gave
himself up wholeheartedly to learning the tongue of his Greek heroes,
and in six weeks Greek was no longer an unknown language to him.
Within three months he was reading his beloved Homer in the original
tongue.
Schliemann, who had the phenomenal ability to learn a language in six
weeks, wandered far over the world, acquiring languages as souvenirs
of the lands he visited, just as modern travellers pick up souvenirs
in shops. But in the end his travels brought him to Greece.
Where other people regarded the songs of Homer as mere legends,
Schliemann never doubted their basic truth. While many wondered
whether Troy ever existed at all, Schliemann in his innermost heart
knew that Troy had been a real city. The wonderful work of Layard
fired his imagination, and gradually the idea formed in his mind that
if Layard had succeeded in digging up the lost city of Nineveh he
himself might find Troy with a spade.
In 1870, filled with the knowledge of years of study, he came to the
desolate Hill of Hissarlik standing on the Plain of Troy, a short
distance from the Dardanelles. He climbed the hill, feeling sure that
beneath his feet were buried the remains of the city of his heroes.
Scholars laughed at his enthusiasm, ridiculed the idea that Hissarlik
could possibly have been Troy. If Troy ever existed, the one thing
certain, they averred, was that it could not possibly have been at
Hissarlik. To most people Troy was merely a myth, a city of the gods
created by Homer himself.
Countering the ridicule with cold logic, Schliemann decided to set
all doubts at rest by the test of excavation. For £300 he bought the
greater part of the site from the Turkish owners and, after many
vexatious delays, began digging into the side of the mighty hill in
1871. He was desperately keen to clear up the mystery of Troy. He set
his labourers to work, cutting the secret out of the heart of the
hill. Men, at Schliemann’s bidding, began to run away with the hill
of Hissarlik in wheelbarrows.
Schliemann’s energy was remarkable, his driving force irresistible.
From dawn till dark he was on the site. His wife, a Greek lady, was
as enthusiastic as her husband, so enthusiastic, indeed, that she and
her maid took picks and spades and dug trenches and made discoveries
for themselves.
So long as Schliemann was eating into the hill, he was happy. His
greatest enemies were feast days and rainy days, for in wet weather
it was impossible to work, and on feast days the Greeks positively
refused to work—a cart-load of money would not win a day’s labour
from them. So on these days Schliemann sat down and wrote up his
discoveries.
He laid bare great walls, and as his diggers burrowed into the hill
they found others immediately below the first, the lower walls buried
in soil and rubbish. Schliemann was amazed. The Hill of Hissarlik was
the most wonderful hill in the world. All the history of thousands of
years was concentrated on this one spot, heaped up there by the hands
of men long dead.
The deeper he dug, the more he marvelled. Here was city heaped on
city, civilization on civilization. The city of one people had been
overwhelmed and covered with debris, then on top of the buried city
another people had erected their own dwellings, probably not
knowing nor caring what lay under their feet. So it went on here for
centuries, for thousands of years, back into the past to the Greeks,
to the Trojans, to an earlier race linked with Crete.
[Illustration:
_By courtesy of the British School at Athens_
A GENERAL VIEW OF THE RUINS OF TROY, SHOWING THE REMARKABLE EXTENT OF
SCHLIEMANN’S EXCAVATIONS AND DISCOVERIES. THESE ANCIENT TROJAN WALLS
WERE COMPLETELY COVERED UNTIL SCHLIEMANN DUG THEM OUT AND LAID BARE
THE LONG-LOST SITE OF THE FAMOUS CITY.]
The original hill increased in size with the centuries. As the
cities were overwhelmed, so the hill grew until in places it was 50
feet higher than the virgin soil on which the first dwellings were
founded. As the height increased, so did the length and breadth. Foot
by foot the debris of vanished peoples accumulated on the hill, foot
by foot the rubbish fell, until in one direction Schliemann found the
hill 250 feet longer than it had originally been, while in another
place he found that 150 feet had been added!
And in all this mountain of debris Schliemann came across relics,
hundreds of them, thousands of them, walls and pieces of pottery and
stone battleaxes, with copper nails used by ladies as hair-pins. His
industry was astounding. He marked the depth at which everything
was found, paid rewards to the finders. If a piece of pottery
with an inscription turned up, the man who turned it up received
additional pay. The diggers, anxious to make all they could, were
more interested in the money than in the work. Some tried to deceive
him by scratching inscriptions on bits of pottery. A magnifying glass
soon laid the frauds bare, and the finders, instead of getting extra
pay, were fined for their deceit. The old diggers soon realized that
it was useless to attempt to deceive Schliemann in this way, and new
diggers were not long in learning the same lesson.
The hill was like an anthill, men scurrying about with wheelbarrows,
men digging away. At times Schliemann had one hundred and fifty
labourers at work, with horses and carts. Once his men were striving
to lever down a mighty wall of earth which long resisted their utmost
efforts. No sooner was it down than another wall collapsed without
warning on some of the diggers. Schliemann saw the catastrophe with
horror. He rushed down and began to dig with all his strength, while
the cries and groans of the buried men fell on his ears. Fortunately
the timbers shoring up the work slipped in such a way that they kept
the weight off the imprisoned men, who were eventually dug out little
the worse for their premature burial.
Not without reason did Homer call Ilium the “windy place,” as
Schliemann realized when he experienced to the full the awful blasts
that swept over the plain. Sometimes the temperature dropped suddenly
and the wind came through their wooden houses and nearly froze
them to death. The only way it was possible to keep warm on these
occasions was to go into a sheltered trench and work at the face of
the hill.
Hundreds of thousands of tons of debris were shifted in driving a
great road like a railway cutting with huge sloping embankments
through the hill. In one trench Schliemann fought his way through two
walls 10 feet thick, and in a little while came to two more walls 6
and 8 feet thick. Mighty blocks of stone had to be wrenched out and
broken up before they could be carted away. The Greeks, coveting this
stone for building purposes, quickly carted it away, but they were
too indolent to assist Schliemann in breaking it up.
Just as a lady cuts into a cake of many layers, so he cut into the
Hill of Hissarlik, and instead of finding one city he found seven,
built one on top of another, with layers of burned ashes and debris
between to mark the calamities which had wiped them out. In some
places the ashes were from 5 to 10 feet thick, irrefutable proof of
the way fire and sword had played about this desolate hill throughout
the ages. He found his city of Troy at a depth of about 30 feet, the
city which flourished three thousand years ago before the Greeks took
it by subterfuge. He laid bare the ancient gate, and while cutting
a trench through a wall near the gate, his delighted eyes caught
their first glimpse of the great Trojan treasure, golden cups and
jugs and silver goblets, some of the gold cups weighing a pound, with
silver cups twice as heavy. Here were necklaces and other jewels all
hurriedly thrust into a hole in the town wall as if some one were
fleeing with the treasure when he was overwhelmed.
Quickly Schliemann sent his men to breakfast before they knew of the
discovery, and very carefully he cut out the treasure from the debris
with his knife, giving it to his wife, who, concealing it beneath her
cloak, hurried with it to their little wooden house on the hill. At
any moment the great wall above him might have collapsed and killed
him, but he was too excited to heed the risk.
For three years Schliemann dug into the Hill of Hissarlik, finding
ruined temples, laying bare castles and towers and city walls. When
he published his discoveries, a storm of criticism arose among men of
science. They laughed him to scorn, refused to believe him, to accept
his evidence. They considered that he was utterly wrong, that his
enthusiasm for Homer had led him astray and betrayed him into error.
The storm of controversy raged on while Schliemann went to Mycenæ and
dug up an even more wonderful treasure than that of Troy, finding the
bodies of ancient kings buried in golden masks and with golden armour
about them. It was a dazzling discovery of the wealth of the Mycenæan
age, and Schliemann proved that his interests were purely scientific
by presenting it all to the museum at Athens.
[Illustration:
_By courtesy of the British School at Athens_
THE CIRCLE OF GRAVES AT MYCENÆ, WHERE SCHLIEMANN FOUND THE ANCIENT
KINGS ALL BURIED IN GOLDEN ARMOUR AND MASKS. IT WAS THE MOST
WONDERFUL TREASURE TROVE EVER DISCOVERED]
Not until the great English statesman, William Ewart Gladstone,
arose and championed Schliemann, did men of science begin to realize
that they were wrong and Schliemann was right. Thus the poor German
grocer boy, who had listened with tears in his eyes to a drunken
miller reciting passages from Homer, lived to lay bare the city of
his dreams with a spade. Working in direct opposition to the opinions
of science, he dug up the city of Troy in the very place where he
knew it must be, and where scientists said it could not possibly have
stood.
The discovery of Troy was the triumph of Schliemann’s faith and
genius.