Free In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood Page A

I, nos 62 and 67,1858–9.) Like many European people in the nineteenth century he knew Homer and loved his tale, but it was probably only his visit to Greece and Troy in the summer of 1868 – and his meeting with Frank Calvert – which gave Schliemann the inspiration to turn to archaeology, and the idea of discovering Homer’s Troy by excavation.
    This kind of textual criticism has revealed other discrepancies about incidents in Schliemann’s career; for instance his story of the San Francisco fire (which he says he witnessed), his alleged meeting with President Fillmore, and now even the find of the so-called ‘Jewels of Helen’ at Troy, which Schliemann has been accused of forging or buying on the black market and planting on site. These doubts have now reached such fever pitch that a request was submitted in 1983 to the National Museum in Athens to test the gold of one of the masks Schliemann found at Mycenae, implicitly suggesting that he faked part of the Mycenae treasures too. It must be said that such allegations are not new: in his own lifetime he was accused of ‘fixing’ his evidence, and some who met him were suspicious. The poet Matthew Arnold thought him ‘devious’ and Gobineau, a French diplomat, called him a ‘charlatan’. Ernst Curtius, the excavator of Olympia, thought him ‘a swindler’. However, these criticisms do not tell the whole truth, as, for example, in the case of the ‘Jewels of Helen’, whose find circumstances can be plausibly established. But there are still some serious discrepancies which make a proper biography all the more desirable. For instance, one question bearing on the archaeology is the disturbing revelation by his contemporary William Borlase that Sophie Schliemann was not present, as her husband alleged, at the discovery of the ‘Treasure of Priam’. She was not even in Turkey! If Schliemann could lie (or fantasise) about this – he said he did it ‘to encourage her interest in archaeology by including her’ – could he have lied about the finds themselves? We know enough about him to say that he could indeed be unscrupulous; he cheated and lied to get his way; he was surreptitious and conniving; he sometimes dug in secret and purloined material; he smuggled his Trojan treasures abroad rather than give them to theTurks; he desperately craved acceptance by the academic world as a serious scholar and archaeologist, and yet, we now know, he lied about something as trivial as the provenance of some inscriptions he had bought in Athens. All this is admitted – and may be thought damning enough. But set against this are the record of the finds in the books and journals and the brilliant letters to The Times , and of course the amazing finds themselves in the Mycenaean room in Athens Museum. Wayward, naïve, enthusiastic, unashamedly romantic, easy to hurt and anxious to learn, Schliemann is a bundle of contradictions; but judgement on him should be made on the basis of his finds. It was his luck – or skill – to achieve the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made by one person. But before we turn to the tale of Schliemann’s incredible finds there is one more question we must ask: why did he turn to archaeology in particular, rather than, say, philology? The story of the search for Troy is inextricably bound up with the beginnings of archaeology as a science.
    ARCHAEOLOGY: THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW SCIENCE
    In Schliemann’s time the very word ‘archaeology’ had only recently begun to be used in its present meaning. It would need a whole book to sketch the intellectual background of mid-nineteenth-century prehistoric scholarship. Without a definitive biography of Schliemann we remain uncertain as to how much contemporary scholarship he had imbibed. For instance, what was he reading in Paris when he was a ‘mature student’ there in the late 1860s? Certainly in the following twenty years he shows an astonishing breadth of reading, especially in