Laura Schlitz: The Hero Schliemann

Heinrich, of course, wanted the story to be true. He wanted to believe that the Trojan War was a real war that happened just the way Homer said it did. If current scholarship held that Troy was a myth, the scholars were wrong. Heinrich preferred the historians of ancient Greece.

The ancient Greek writers believed that there had once been a great war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Greek historians like Thucydides (c. 460–400 BCE) and Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE) considered the Trojan War part of their ancient history, and although they couldn’t be sure exactly when it occurred, they agreed that it took place roughly eight hundred years before their time, around 1250 BCE. Greek historians came up with these dates by keeping track of family histories and stories: “Let’s see, my grandfather said his grandfather said his grandfather said . . .” This is not the most accurate way to keep track of historic events, but the Trojan War took place before the Greeks adopted an alphabet from the Phoenicians and began to write.

The ancient Greek historians also agreed that Homer lived four to six hundred years after the Trojan War. It is most likely that Homer’s two great works, The Iliad and The Odyssey , were composed orally and sung by bards. During the seventh century, the Greeks became fully literate, and different versions of the poems were tacked together and written down.

Homer was the greatest poet of the ancient world. According to tradition, he lived nearly three thousand years ago. He was said to have been blind: in ancient Greece, blind men often became storytellers. When we speak of those two astonishing poems , The Iliad and The Odyssey, we say they are “by Homer.”

Homer is a mysterious figure. Everyone agrees on his genius — but no one is sure whether or not he ever lived. Some scholars think that the poems were composed by many men, over hundreds of years. Heinrich Schliemann believed in a single “Homer” — the blind poet of legend .

According to many scholars, Homer never wrote a line of poetry. During his lifetime, the Greeks had no alphabet. The great poems were created, learned by heart, and chanted aloud. This must have been a staggering feat of memorization — both The Iliad and The Odyssey are so long, it would take several days to recite them .

Homer’s two masterpieces are very different . The Iliad is the tale of the warriors who fought in the Trojan War, particularly the doomed and defiant Achilles and his enemy, the noble Hector . The Odyssey, which takes place after the invasion of Troy, is an adventure story. It follows Odysseus, the craftiest of the Greek warriors, on his journey home to Ithaca .

By the time Heinrich Schliemann was born, European historians had come to question the entire existence of a poet named Homer. They even wondered whether there had been a Trojan War. Above all, they wondered how much truth could be left in a story after it had been told and retold for hundreds of years. Scholars reasoned that if there had ever been any historic truth to The Iliad , it had long ago been lost.

Heinrich, of course, did not reason that way. In matters that touched on Homer, Heinrich did not reason: he was ruled by his imagination and his heart. He worshiped Homer and adored The Iliad , and he believed that if Homer’s poem sang of a city of Troy near the Dardanelles, it was a real city. If Heinrich followed the clues in Homer’s poems very carefully, he might be able to find the ruins of that city and bring it to light.

Heinrich’s visit to “the fatherland of my darling Homer” began in 1868, with a visit to Corfu, the Greek island where the shipwrecked Odysseus met the princess Nausikaa. In The Odyssey , Odysseus meets the princess by the River Cressida, where she is washing clothes with her maids. Because Odysseus is naked, he holds a branch in front of his loins. Heinrich followed the same path, and suffered the same embarrassment as Homer’s hero. In order to cross the river, he took off his trousers. A number of women in a nearby field stopped work long enough to have a good giggle at the German businessman in his underwear. It seems likely that Heinrich was, in a private, middle-aged way, playing Odysseus — and it was a good role for him. Odysseus was a crafty man, quick to invent a tale, a traveler who had been shipwrecked and stranded.

After Corfu, Heinrich followed Odysseus back to his homeland — Ithaca. Unlike Troy, Ithaca was a name that could be found on any map. Whether Odysseus ever lived was a matter of opinion, but there was no question as to where he lived: Odysseus was king of Ithaca. There were even guidebooks that gave locations for “Odysseus’s palace” and other Homeric sites. Heinrich was exactly the kind of tourist for whom these books were written. He walked in his hero’s footsteps and shed tears at the sites where Odysseus once wept.

He also did his first digging. He dug in the ground where folk memory placed the palace of Odysseus. Here he found five or six vases filled with ashes. Since the Greeks in Homer’s poem cremated their dead and buried the ashes in vases, Heinrich’s fancy took a giant leap. “It is very possible that I have in my five little vases the bodies of Odysseus and Penelope.” It was his first excavation, and one that was to prove characteristic. He followed the story, delved into the earth, and leaped to ecstatic conclusions about whatever he found.

After this heady discovery, Heinrich proceeded to Mycenae, the stronghold of Agamemnon. It was said that the warrior-king of The Iliad lay buried there, though his tomb had never been found. Heinrich admired the famous lion-carved gates of the Mycenean kings and braved the bats in Agamemnon’s treasury. He spent the next week exploring the Greek islands, before proceeding to Bunarbashi, a Turkish village near the Dardanelles.

Heinrich was not the only man in Europe who believed in a real Trojan War and a real Troy. Though he was in the minority, he was not alone. Other scholars who had considered the matter had concluded that Homer’s Troy might lie beneath the village of Bunarbashi. Heinrich decided to see for himself.

From the first, Heinrich was disappointed by Bunarbashi. For one thing, it was dirty, which offended his tidy soul. For another, it was ten miles from the sea. Heinrich, who knew much of The Iliad by heart, remembered that the Greek warriors went back and forth from their ships to the city several times a day. If the distance between the two points was ten miles, this would be impossible. He also recalled the famous scene in The Iliad in which the Greek hero Achilles chased the Trojan prince Hector around the walled city. Heinrich tried to act out the chase and failed. The hill was so steep that he could get around it only by crawling on all fours. Heinrich was perplexed: Homer could not have been mistaken about the chase . Since Homer could not be wrong, Troy must lie on some other hill. After a cursory dig, Heinrich abandoned Bunarbashi for the plain of Hissarlik.