In Search of the Trojan War (9 page)

SCHLIEMANN AND ROMANTICISM

Juxtaposed with Schliemann’s craving to be a serious scholar was another aspect of his intellectual and temperamental make-up which deserves mention. Indeed if we read him right, it was his crucial emotional ‘trigger’ – it was romantic philhellenism, the love of things Greek. This may seem hard to understand now, but Schliemann’s birth and youth coincided with an event which had a decisive effect on many European artists and thinkers: the Greek War of Independence.

Between the day in 1453 when Cyriac of Ancona rode into Constantinople by the side of Mehmet II when the city was
conquered by the Turks, and the day Lord Byron died in the malarial swamps of Missolonghi, an extraordinary development had taken place in western European culture, whose effects are still very much with us. Of course the liberation from the Turks was chiefly achieved by the Greeks themselves, inspired by western-educated Greeks who worked in European intellectual circles. But it was not simply a matter of the way Greeks looked at themselves; the way the west looked at Greece was also important. Such was the incredible impact in the Renaissance of the rediscovery of classical Greek civilisation that, as we have seen, the idea of the rebirth of a Hellenic nation was first conceived
in Greece
in the fifteenth century. But it was precisely then that Greece fell to the Ottoman Empire and became one of its most impoverished provinces, economically and culturally. From that time the idea of Hellas reborn was maintained outside Greece and it is fascinating to see how the War of Independence in the 1820s was preceded by a great outpouring of books by western Hellenists on the history and culture of ancient Greece. As perceived by Pletho and Cyriac in the fifteenth century, the development of nationalism and that of archaeology went hand in hand. So to read what travellers and artists of the time wrote – a poet like Byron, or, slightly later, a musician like Berlioz, composer of
The Trojans
– is to sense some of the romantic philhellenism which evidently inspired the self-educated Schliemann, even if he actually acquired it late in life in the classroom in Paris; ‘making my beloved Greece live again’, as he put it, was a common goal for nineteenth-century intellectuals and artists, and inevitably the new science of archaeology did not escape such feelings – how could it? At one level it is the most romantic of all sciences since it involves the actual physical reconstitution of the lost past. In a sense, then, the physical recovery of ancient Greece, which began with the digs at the classical sites of Olympia and Samothrace in the 1860s and was followed by Troy, Mycenae and the rest under Schliemann in the 1870s, was the logical culmination of nineteenth-century philhellenism; only this can explain Schliemann’s seemingly
genuine desire to ‘prove the truth’ of the ancient stories, even more than to find treasure. His time, after all, was deeply troubled, plagued by revolutions and war, by colonialism and imperialism, culminating in the terrible Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 (of which Schliemann had a first-hand glimpse – neighbouring houses in his street in Paris were blasted by gunfire). The great practical achievements of nineteenth-century ‘civilisation’ were in the eyes of many tainted by the prospect of future horrors. What more enticing idea than to discover an almost limitless prospect: a recoverable history stretching back deep into lost time? Progress – that great goal of nineteenth-century thinkers – progress to a culture of noble aspirations, simple moral grandeur, could indeed be made, but by journeying backwards. Though outside the scope of this book, this aspect of Schliemann and his contemporaries should not be overlooked: ‘I have lived my life with this race of demigods; I know them so well that I feel they must have known me,’ wrote Berlioz of the Homeric heroes; many passages in Schliemann’s books show that he felt exactly the same.

WHERE WAS HOMER’S TROY?

No stone there is without a name.

LUCAN

The site of classical Ilion (in Latin Ilium Novum) occupies the north-west corner of a low plateau between the Menderes river (classical Scamander) and the Dumrek Su (Simois). The Greek and Roman city was quite extensive – its walls enclosed an area of about 1200 by 800 yards – but at its north-west extremity there is a mound about 700 feet square which falls away sharply to the plain on the west and north; this mound rose about 30 feet above the adjacent plateau and about 130 feet above the plain before Schliemann began his dig, though it may have been higher and steeper in the Bronze Age before classical builders levelled it off. This mound, known as Hisarlik, the ‘place of the fort’, had been the acropolis of the classical city, site of civic
buildings and a temple of Athena. No one had paid it much attention in the debate over the lost site of Homer’s Troy; it was first noticed by travellers in the 1740s, when part of the circuit wall built in Alexander the Great’s day was still visible amid the undergrowth and olive trees. By 1801, when Edward Clarke went to the spot, the foundation blocks were being plundered by local Turks; they had gone by the 1850s and now even the line of the circuit is difficult to trace. From these signs, and from the coins he found there, Clarke rightly concluded that this ‘ancient citadel on its elevated spot of ground, surrounded on all sides by a level plain’, was ‘evidently the remains of New Ilium’. But although some scholars accepted the proposition made by the armchair topographer Maclaren in 1822, that this must also be the site of Homeric Troy, no attempt was made to test the hypothesis by the spade until Frank Calvert and Schliemann.

Such was the meagre archaeological background to this famous place when Frank Calvert turned to it. At this stage the Troy–Bunarbashi theory still held the field, but after excavations there in 1864 had drawn a blank, Frank Calvert was finally able to dig on Hisarlik. It was a site he must have known since childhood, and he acquired from a local farmer a field which contained the northern part of the mound. As we have seen, he began to excavate in 1865 and immediately uncovered remains of the Athena temple and the wall of Lysimachus, the beautifully built classical city wall whose remains were to be swept away by Schliemann. Calvert also struck Bronze-Age levels, and realised that Hisarlik was deeply stratified, in places with 40 or 50 feet of accumulated debris.

Schliemann first visited the Troad in August 1868. From Calvert’s letters we can be certain that at this time Schliemann espoused Lechevalier’s Bunarbashi theory, and he poked around there for a couple of days. Hisarlik evidently had made no impression on him – contrary to the fiction
here
. It was only when he met Calvert at Çanakkale on his way back to Constantinople that he heard details of Calvert’s excavation, and his theory that Hisarlik was an artificial mound with ‘the ruins and debris of temples and palaces which succeeded each other
over long centuries’, a theory Calvert had formulated as long ago as Newton’s visit in 1853. Schliemann was immediately convinced by Calvert that this was the site of Homer’s Troy, as he says in his first book, published in French the next year: ‘After carefully examining the Trojan plain on two occasions, I fully agree with the conviction of this
savant
[Calvert] that the high plateau of Hisarlik is the position of ancient Troy, and that this hill is the site of its Pergamos.’ In fact Schliemann entirely owed this idea to Calvert, and an extraordinary letter written to Calvert from Paris that October shows that Schliemann had only the dimmest recollection of what Hisarlik had actually
looked like
! So much had his attention focused on Bunarbashi. In passing, he asked Calvert everything from why he thought the hill artificial to what was the best type of hat to wear, and ‘Should I take an iron bedstead and pillow with me?’ Calvert provided all the answers to the questionnaire with patient detail. Later Schliemann would deny Calvert’s inspiration and help, and in 1875, in a letter to the
Manchester Guardian
, Calvert was forced to quote Schliemann against himself: ‘Had anyone else proposed for me to dig away a hill at my cost, I would not even have listened to him!’ So Calvert was the ‘onlie begetter’ of the idea, and Schliemann was later unwilling to share his glory.

There was still the problem of permission. Schliemann was in an independent country and from the mid-1860s, when their imperial museum was founded, the Turkish government were increasingly concerned to preserve their ancient remains. Persuasive as ever, Schliemann had no trouble getting his firman, his permit; but its conditions were clear: the finds would be divided, with half going to the Turkish archaeological museum; ruins he uncovered should be left in the state in which they were found, and existing structures should not be demolished; lastly, Schliemann should foot the bill. The last of these was the only one he observed; indeed his cavalier treatment of the Turks, his destruction of many walls on the site, and especially his theft of treasure from Troy, have resulted in a permanent mistrust of foreign archaeologists in Turkey. Clearly Schliemann found it
difficult to abandon a lifetime’s habit of fast operating, and often practised deception to get his own way.

He began a preliminary excavation in April 1870, and over 1871–3 made three major campaigns totalling over nine months’ work with anything from eighty to 160 workmen on site each day. Although Calvert counselled a network of smaller trenches, rather than immense platforms, Schliemann decided to drive vast trenches through the mound, removing hundreds of tons of earth and rubble, demolishing earlier structures which stood in his way. Among the walls which went forever were, as we have seen, parts of the beautiful limestone city wall of Lysimachus, and, in two places behind it, an earlier wall of finely worked limestone blocks which Schliemann considered too fine to be early; in fact, we now know Schliemann had unwittingly struck part of the city which, if anything, was Homeric Troy.

The results of Schliemann’s initial depredations can still be seen today; what is left is the ruin of a ruin. By 1872 Calvert had withdrawn his agreement for Schliemann to dig his part of the mound, and the two had – temporarily – fallen out. It is not hard to see why.

The fact is that Schliemann was completely perplexed by the complexity of the mound, baffled by the stratification. Fortunately he was wise enough to accept advice: ‘
Only the exact findspot
of an object in the excavation can accurately indicate the epoch. Take good heed of that!’ the French architect Burnouf wrote to him in 1872. He did well to insist, for nothing so complex had ever been excavated, and Schliemann had to learn his technique as he went along. It is futile to criticise Schliemann for this: other digs of the time were simpler sites, as at Samothrace, or done like ‘digging for potatoes’, as Müller said of the British dig at Carchemish, near the Syrian border, in 1878–81. Gradually, however, in the course of these three seasons he succeeded in identifying four successive strata or ‘cities’ below the classical Ilium, and he came to the conclusion that the Homeric one was the second city from the bottom, which had been destroyed in a great conflagration. His claim that this tiny
place – 100 yards across – was the Homeric Ilium, with its towers and ‘great walls’, did not excite much belief, despite his enthusiastic exaggerations in his reports and letters. Schliemann was especially infuriated by an article by Frank Calvert in the
Levant Herald
(4 February 1873) in which Calvert acknowledged Schliemann’s prehistoric strata below the Roman, but brilliantly observed that ‘a most important link is missing between 1800 and 700 BC, a gap of over 1000 years, including the date of the Trojan War, 1193–1184 BC, no relics of the intervening epoch having yet been discovered between that indicated by the prehistoric stone implements and that of pottery of the Archaic style’. In other words the Trojan War was not there! Blind to the implications of Calvert’s argument, Schliemann lashed out hysterically, accusing Calvert of stabbing him in the back, and later calling him a ‘foul fiend … a libeller and a liar’. Within weeks, however, Schliemann found his justification, in
his
Troy (II), when at the very end of his final season, probably 31 May 1873, he made the first, and most controversial, of his famous discoveries of treasure – the so-called ‘Treasure of Priam’.

I came upon a large copper article of the most remarkable form, which attracted my attention all the more and I thought I saw gold behind it. … I cut out the treasure with a large knife, which it was impossible to do without the very greatest exertion and the most fearful risk of my life, for the great fortification-wall, beneath which I had to dig, threatened every moment to fall down on me. But the sight of so many objects, every one of which is of inestimable value to archaeology, made me foolhardy, and I never thought of any danger. It would, however, have been impossible for me to have removed the treasure without the help of my dear wife, who stood by me ready to pack the things which I cut out in her shawl and to carry them away.

The ‘treasure’, so Schliemann alleged, comprised copper salvers and cauldrons inside which were cups in gold, silver, electrum and bronze, a gold ‘sauceboat’, vases, thirteen copper lanceheads, and, most beautiful of all, a mass of several thousand small gold rings
and decorative pieces, with gold bracelets, a gold headband, four beautiful earrings, and two splendid gold diadems, one of which comprised over 16,000 tiny pieces of gold threaded on gold wire. This last, which became known as the ‘Jewels of Helen’, was the headdress in which Sophie Schliemann was later photographed, one of the most famous images of the nineteenth century.

The find caused a sensation: in fact it was this more than anything that helped Schliemann’s claims to be taken seriously. But we now know that, at the very best, Schliemann greatly embellished his account for effect. Recently some scholars have even argued that the treasure itself was fabricated and planted, but it was certainly of the right date for its context, which recent research suggests was possibly a cist grave dug into Troy II layers from Troy III, though Schliemann’s account is too imprecise to be sure. We also now know that gold had been found sporadically at this level earlier in the year, including a major find of similar jewellery in illicit digging by his workmen. Also, when the Americans re-excavated this area in the 1930s they found scattered gold in almost every room, as if the inhabitants of Troy II had fled in panic before the onslaught which engulfed their city: so Troy II remains a possibility for the ‘Jewels of Helen’. There seems reason, then, to believe that Schliemann did find these marvellous things, but probably over several weeks rather than in one sensational hoard. This he had kept under wraps to smuggle out of Turkey at the end of excavation, and he wrote it up in Athens where the confused postdating in his journal led modern investigators to think the whole thing a concoction. As for Sophie’s help, she was in Athens at the time, as Schliemann admitted to the English visitor Borlase, but this white lie need not (in my opinion at least) vitiate the find as a whole. Unfortunately, the treasure itself, which might have provided a few more answers, vanished in Berlin in 1945, so today the paltry survivors of the gold of Troy are a pair of beautiful earrings, a necklace, rings and pins, part of the finds made later by Schliemann in 1878 and 1882; these can still be seen in Istanbul Museum, along with
misshapen gold ingots, the remains of a priceless treasure of the third millennium BC. Other gold finds from the 1870s were doubtless melted down in the villages near Hisarlik. And that, we must assume now, is the fate of the Berlin treasure, the ‘Jewels of Helen’ and the rest: ironic, for had the British Museum coughed up the £100 to Calvert (
see here
), the treasure might still be safe in Bloomsbury!