In Search of the Trojan War (10 page)

Back in Athens, with furious Turkish agents on his trail, Schliemann was jubilant. The treasure was the kind of luck he had needed in his campaign to persuade the world of scholarship that his costly obsession was well-founded, that he had located the world of the heroes, and that it did indeed have high material culture – and gold, as Homer said. For him the wall where the treasure lay was clearly Priam’s palace, and the pieces themselves ‘hurriedly packed into the chest by some member of the palace of the family of King Priam’. He could not resist a jibe at the doubters: ‘This treasure of the
supposed mythical
King Priam, of the
mythical
heroic age which I discovered at a great depth in the ruins of the
supposed mythical Troy
, is at all events an event which stands alone in archaeology.’

It was, but writing in English to Newton he was more circumspect:

Troy is not large; but Homer is an epic poet and no historian. He never saw either the great tower of Ilium, nor the divine wall, nor Priam’s palace, because when he visited Troy 300 years after its destruction all those monuments were for 300 years couched with its ten feet thick layers of the red ashes and ruins of Troy, and another city stood upon that layer, a city which in its turn must have undergone great convulsions and increased that layer considerably. Homer made no excavations to bring these monuments to light, but he knew them by tradition for Troy’s tragical fate had ever since its destruction been in the mouth of the rhapsodes. Ancient Troy has no Acropolis and the
Pergamos is a pure invention of the poet
. (My italics.) Such would not have been the impression gained by the public from Schliemann’s book.

As he admitted privately, what still nagged Schliemann was the question: was this indeed Homer’s Troy? Two facts in particular perturbed him. First, the size of the prehistoric settlement – 100 yards by 80 at the maximum – seemed far too small for the great city Homer portrays. Where were the wide streets, towers and gates depicted by the poet? Moreover there was no sign that the settlement extended on to the plateau as he and Calvert had expected. Second, deep though they were, the prehistoric strata had produced obscure and primitive pottery which seemed far too primitive for the age of heroes to which Schliemann would assign them: where, for instance, was the elaborate palace decoration Homer mentions? Of course much of it had only ever existed in Homer’s imagination, but Schliemann had also been unlucky. Much, though not all, of the top of the hill, with its Bronze-Age layers, had been sliced off in antiquity by the builders of Ilium Novum; so, attacking from the north, Schliemann had virtually no chance of finding Mycenaean material which might have given him – or a visitor like Newton – a ‘fix’ against pottery already found in Rhodes and Attica. He was confused and confounded, so much so that as early as 1871, when a party of eminent German scholars had visited the site and declared that Homer’s Troy was not here but at Bunarbashi after all, Schliemann bowed to their wisdom (with his habitual deference to professional scholars) and came to doubt his intuition after all. That autumn he wrote in his journal that he had ‘given up all hope of finding Troy’. Perhaps, he thought, it had only ever existed in the mind of the poet. In November he went so far as to open an excavation at Akça Köy, the site proposed by Frank’s brother Frederick: Hisarlik ‘perplexes me more and more every day,’ he wrote to James Calvert. ‘I can dig there [Akça] more next spring in order to see whether I cannot discover there Troy if I do not find it at Hisarlik.’

So much of what Schliemann found was new to scholarship as a whole, not just to him, that his confusion was understandable: he begged everyone for advice. His first major publication of his finds in 1874 consisted of field reports with a
great loose album of over 200 sketches, plans and photographs ‘in the hope that my colleagues might be able to explain points obscure to me … [for] everything appeared strange and mysterious to me’. Such was the reality of Schliemann’s ‘new world of archaeology’! That, and the discomfort, the malaria, the scorpions and insects, the fevers when the rains came, the fierce wind from the north which ‘drives the dust into our eyes’ and blew through the chinks in the dig hut at night (it soon ceased to be gratifying to the romantic Schliemann that Troy was indeed as Homer said, ‘very windy’). He fought off constipation with a ‘bottle of best English stout every day’, but he and Sophie were often so ill that ‘we cannot undertake the direction [of the dig] throughout the day in the terrible heat of the sun’. Such physical hardships simply do not happen in archaeology today, and Schliemann stuck it for twelve seasons over the next twenty years at huge personal expense. The motive was hardly fame. Or gold. Even if Schliemann himself took time to realise it, he kept going back because he still had questions to answer.

Schliemann had considered the 1873 dig his last on the site. In his initial flush of enthusiasm he claimed the ‘Treasure of Priam’ as proof that he had indeed found Homer’s Troy. But true to his underlying honesty, he realised that he had not solved the key problems satisfactorily, and his thoughts soon went back to Hisarlik. He began to negotiate for a new permit to dig there. But the Turks, furious about the theft and smuggling of the treasure, turned him down. When he finally got permission in 1876 (with a large cash payment) his mind was elsewhere. He had decided to dig at the site of the stronghold of Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces at Troy: Mycenae.

MYCENAE RICH IN GOLD

Though it had been deserted for well over 2000 years, Mycenae had never been forgotten. As we have seen, Thucydides had visited its ruins and was happy to agree with Homer’s account of its pre-eminence at the time of the Trojan War – as the ‘capital’
of the Mycenaean ‘empire’. In the ancient world everybody accepted that this was the place to which Agamemnon had returned to be murdered after the sack of Troy, and it was the general belief that he and the other kings of the Atreid dynasty had been buried there. Although abandoned after the destruction by Argos in 468 BC, Mycenae still had impressive ruins to show, its Cyclopean walls and the tremendous ‘beehive’ or tholos tombs which were thought to be the burial places of the ancient kings. These were visited by the Greek traveller Pausanias in the second century AD, and he describes the Lion Gate and the tholos tombs said to be of Atreus and Agamemnon. But in comparison with Troy and many of the sites of Greece and Crete, Mycenae was unvisited by postclassical travellers and there seems to be no first-hand account of it between Pausanias and the Frenchman Fauvel in 1780. The site, though, was never lost, appearing on Italian maps from the seventeenth century onwards, and the remains of its great walls were always visible above ground.

When John Morritt of Rokeby, Walter Scott’s friend, went there early in 1795 after visiting the Troad to participate in the Bryant controversy (
see here
), his is the first detailed account since Pausanias (in fact he used Pausanias’ writings as his guide!). Morritt was a keen traveller, ignoring hardships at a time when few travelled and fewer explored. Led by a ‘country labourer’, he reached the Lion Gate, admiring its ‘rudely carved bas-rilievo’. Mycenae, he thought, could have changed but little since Pausanias; in that he was probably right. Morritt also forced his way into the choked Treasury of Atreus and described the massive lintel block (‘beyond anything we have seen’) which he compared to the lintel at Orchomenos, another tholos tomb associated with the Homeric Age.

Morritt’s journal was made available to a number of scholars who followed him to Mycenae in the next thirty years. First and most controversial was Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, now notorious for his removal of the Elgin marbles. In the summer of 1802, while the marbles were being taken down from the Parthenon in Athens, Elgin made a tour of Greece searching for
other antiquities; when he visited Mycenae he was so impressed by the ruins that he immediately began excavation there under cover of a permit from the Turkish government, which then controlled Greece. In the half-blocked entrance to the Treasury of Atreus he uncovered a number of pieces of the red and green marble friezes which had fallen from the façade of the tomb; he also found (perhaps in one of the other tholos tombs) two massive monumental fragments of a bull relief in hard black limestone which can be seen today in the British Museum. Elgin also removed the main portions of the green marble decorated zigzag half-columns which in 1802 still flanked the door of the tomb; the remainder were taken by the Marquis of Sligo in 1810 and set up at Westport House in County Mayo, to be given to the British Museum in 1905; that they are not today on the monument for which they were created (and of which they were an integral part) is greatly to be regretted. Elgin even cast covetous eyes on the magnificent relief on the Lion Gate itself, but decided reluctantly that it was too heavy and too far from the sea to be transported away.

Other visitors in those last two decades before Greek independence took a more constructive attitude towards the antiquities of the prehistoric age. Chief among them were English scholars, who examined, measured and drew the Treasury and the Lion Gate. Edward Clarke, whom we have already met at Troy, went there. William Leake, in his
Travels in the Morea
, set the standards for nineteenth-century classical topography with what is still one of the best descriptions of the site. Charles Cockerell made a small excavation on the outside of the roof of the Treasury of Atreus to establish the nature of its ‘beehive construction’. Edward Dodwell attempted to define Cyclopean architecture in a lavish folio volume which included the first illustrations of the walls and tholoi of Mycenae and Tiryns. William Gell, in the course of extensive itineraries all over Greece, sought out further fragments of the decorations and described the Lion Gate as the ‘earliest authenticated specimen of sculpture in Europe’. All these were significant steps in the
growth of modern understanding of the Mycenaean civilisation; some, like Leake and Clarke, still deserve reading in their own right as marvellously observant travel books: Leake’s indeed is one of the best archaeological travel books ever written. These writers knew their classical sources, their Homer and Thucydides; it is thanks to them that, from the start of modern archaeological inquiry, these ruins were assumed to date from the prehistoric, ‘heroic’ age of Greece, and also that progress had already been made in piecing together ideas about the style of ‘Cyclopean’ architecture. The way had been prepared for Schliemann, and he carefully studied all these books before and during his dig at Mycenae.

Before we go to Mycenae with Schliemann, though, two other visitors who preceded him should be noted, for their discoveries were potentially of the greatest importance in the progress of Mycenaean studies. In 1809 Thomas Burgon visited Mycenae ‘south of the southernmost angle of the wall of the acropolis’, and picked up some fragments of Mycenaean pottery which he published with a colour plate in 1847 as ‘An attempt to point out the Vases of Greece proper which belong to the Heroic and Homeric Age’. It was this simple but revolutionary article which Charles Newton had in mind when he visited Lechevalier’s Troy at Bunarbashi in 1853 with Frank Calvert (
see here
):

If this hill has ever been an acropolis we might expect to find those fragments of very early pottery which, as was first remarked by the late Mr Burgon, are so abundant on the Homeric sites of Mycenae and Tiryns. Of such pottery I saw not a vestige. …

Burgon and Newton’s observations lie at the root of all the present-day studies of the chronology of the Mycenaean world, and in fact when he saw Schliemann’s pottery from Mycenae Newton was also able to advance a rough
absolute
chronology for the Heroic Age at Mycenae, by the simple device of a comparison with similar pottery found in Egypt which could
be dated to around 1375 BC. It was Schliemann’s discussions Newton which made him assert his dependence on pottery dating (as in
Mycenae
, 1880), though the implications of Newton’s conclusions for his Troy dig seem to have eluded him to the last.

It was natural that the Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus should have attracted the main attention of the nineteenth-century investigators just as they had done in Pausanias’ day. But of course it was the interior of the citadel, if anywhere, which was likely to provide answers about the early history of the place, and this had attracted little interest before Schliemann. Few travellers had even bothered to look around it, though Leake provided a rough map and described the overgrown slopes inside the gate, with traces of terraces and walling. Dodwell’s engraving suggests that the whole area was overgrown, with no major structures visible; likewise a watercolour done in 1834 shows that even the Lion Gate itself was completely choked with rubble and bushes, the bastions on either side ruined and covered with earth. This is what Schliemann had seen when in 1868 he first set eyes on the legendary stronghold of Agamemnon, the city ‘rich in gold’, as Homer had said. Schliemann’s guides from Corinth had never heard of Mycenae, but a farm boy from Charvati who took him to the site knew the citadel as ‘the fortress of Agamemnon’ and the Treasury of Atreus as ‘Agamemnon’s tomb’. For Schliemann this was virtual confirmation of the ancient myths. Eternal romantic that he was, his response to such stories was no different from that of the musicians and artists of his day, as for example the artist von Stackelberg, who actually went to Mycenae to paint:

I sat for hours in solemn solitude in front of the gigantic ruins, and while my pen reproduced their bold outlines I thought about the gigantic figures of the Greek heroes in this memorable place, the heroes who, murdering and murdered, were sacrificed to their inexorable fate.

Now in the summer of 1876 Schliemann was about to cap the imaginings of his fellow romantics. At Mycenae he would do no less than bring the Heroic Age to life.

THE MASK OF AGAMEMNON

The key to Schliemann’s incredible success at Mycenae lay in a passage in Pausanias’ book describing the tombs of the murdered Agamemnon and his companions as lying inside rather than outside the walls. Scholars had always assumed that Pausanias was referring to the great tholos tombs, including what we today call the Treasury of Atreus, and therefore that the walls of which he spoke were those of the outer circuit which lies well beyond the citadel. Schliemann was certain the scholars were wrong, and had been laughed at for saying so in print in the book he wrote after his 1868 trip. He insisted that Pausanias meant the great Cyclopean defences of the citadel, and that the heroes of Troy lay inside the Lion Gate itself. Preposterous said the scholars – where was there room for a cemetery within this small citadel on its steep hill, and in any case, they argued, since when did the ancients bury their dead within their cities? Determined to prove his point, in early September 1876, with a permit from the Greek government, Schliemann started digging a trench just inside the Lion Gate, cutting through several feet of wreckage that had fallen or been washed down the hillside. The end of Schliemann’s trench can still be seen gouged into the side of the hill at the foot of the stairs which face the visitor immediately inside the gate. This trench he drove westwards across a small flat terraced area inside the Cyclopean walls; there he immediately struck the remains of a series of upright stone markers which formed a circle nearly 90 feet in diameter. The ground had clearly been carefully levelled in antiquity, and within this space Schliemann found a carved upright stone resembling a grave monument; his excitement grew as others soon followed, bearing the clearly distinguishable images of warriors in chariots. The sensational discoveries which ensued are now part of archaeological legend,
but the fresh breath of discovery can still be read in Schliemann’s letters to
The Times
(reprinted in English in
Briefwechsel
II) and in his great book
Mycenae
.