Free In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood

finds (like the five letters found in 1982 in Belfast, of all places) and you have an idea of the size of the task involved in trying to disentangle fact from fiction in Schliemann’s life. It is a task beyond the scope of one lifetime, for Schliemann was a man of colossal energy, addicted to words and ideas, a correspondent in a dozen languages. Many books have been written about him since he began his dig at Troy–Hisarlik, but as yet there is no reliable biography; it is the main gap in our imperfect knowledge of Troy, and clearly now it will take a prodigious effort to reconstitute his finds. So the reader who is fascinated by the remarkable story of one of the most extraordinary people of the nineteenth century – a genius, let no one be in any doubt over that – needs to be wary of accepting the myth Schliemann put forward about himself, and which the world swallowed so willingly, for, as he himself admitted, ‘my biggest fault, being a braggart and a bluffer … yielded countless advantages.’ Addicted to hyperbole, braggadocio, and often downright lies, Schliemann presents us with the curious paradox of being at once the ‘father of archaeology’ and a teller of tall stories.
    We cannot, for instance, even be sure of the truth of his famous tale about his childhood, which is accepted unquestioningly even by his critics. At the age of eight, he recounts in Ilios , published in 1880, he received from his father a Christmas present of Jerrer’s Universal History which contained the story of Troy with an engraving of Aeneas escaping from the burning towers of Troy.
    ‘Father, Jerrer must have seen Troy,’ [Schliemann says he said]
    ‘otherwise he could not have represented it here.’
    ‘My son,’he replied, ‘that is merely a fanciful picture’…
    ‘Father!’ retorted I, ‘if such walls once existed they cannot havebeen completely destroyed: vast ruins of them must still remain, but hidden away beneath the dust of ages’ …
    In the end we both agreed that I should one day excavate Troy.
    This story first appears in a less developed form, and with differences of fact, in Ithaque, le Péloponnèse et Troie , written in 1868 when Schliemann was forty-six: this is the first mention in any source of what Schliemann claimed had been a lifelong obsession, namely to uncover the ruins of Troy and prove the truth of Homer’s story. But is it true? In December 1868 he wrote a letter to his eighty-eight-year-old father regarding the new book:
    In the foreword I have given my biography, I have said that when I was ten … I heard the tale of the Trojan War from you … I have said that you were the cause of this [i.e. the thirty-six-year obsession] because you often told me of the Homeric heroes, and because that first impression received by me as a child lasted throughout my life.
    The sceptic might infer that this was the first old Schliemann had heard of it, and indeed a cool look at his son’s correspondence suggests that the story of Schliemann’s obsession is indeed an invention. After a childhood in Mecklenburg Schliemann became a wealthy businessman in St Petersburg and the United States. He was often involved in unscrupulous dealings – for instance he cornered the saltpetre market for gunpowder in the Crimean War, bought gold off prospectors in the California gold-rush, and dealt in cotton during the American Civil War – at least, that was his story. In the late 1850s he seems to have wanted to break away from his business career into more intellectual pursuits in order to gain respectability. His first hopes were to become a landed proprietor, devoting himself to agriculture. When this failed, he wanted to turn to some sort of activity in a scientific field, perhaps philology, but was soon discouraged: ‘It is too late for me to turn to a scientific career,’ he wrote. …‘I have been working too long as a merchant to hope I can still achieve something in the scientific field.’ ( Letters ,