The German Genius

War (1854–56), Schliemann further cornered the market in saltpeter, brimstone, and lead, all needed in ammunition, and made a further fortune from the Russian government. Only after all this, in the late 1860s, did Schliemann turn to archaeology.
    Schliemann sank himself into the Greek world, going so far as to divorce Ekaterina (in America, after a series of subterfuges) and advertise for a Greek wife in the Athenian press—he chose her from a clutch of photographs submitted.
    By the nineteenth century, the actual site of Troy was far from certain (in the eighteenth century people could fall out for a lifetime arguing where it was). Nowadays, there are scholars who doubt that it ever existed or that the Trojan War ever took place, and who think therefore that Homer’s classics are works of fiction. Nonetheless, over the centuries three sites have competed for the honor. Until Christian times, few doubted that Troy was identical with the “Village of the Ilians” at the hill of Hissarlik, near the Simois River. The geographer Strabo, on the other hand, opted for Callicolone, farther south and farther inland, which had two springs close together, which Homer describes and are not found at Hissarlik. Later travelers favored Alexandria Troas, an impressive set of ruins on the coast, but much farther south still.
    Schliemann was not a scientific historian, nor an archaeologist, something that would rankle with Curtius. But Schliemann was the first to use excavation to test a hypothesis, and this use of the “experimental method,” according to many, makes him the true father of archaeology. 27
    His excavation of Hissarlik started in 1869. Part of the land where the great mound was located was owned by the controversial American consul in the area, Frank Calvert, and he and Schliemann formed what would become an uneasy partnership. 28 Over the years, Schliemann (and others) discovered several layers on the site, as many as seven—or even eight—cities, one on top of the other. Two problems dogged him. One was the massive trench he dug to enable him to inspect all levels quickly, and that, in view of what happened—or didn’t happen—later, may well have destroyed the evidence that could have decided matters one way or the other. This trench showed shards of material quite high up in the sequence that were obviously much older than the period of the Trojan War. The second problem was his discovery, in May 1873, of the so-called treasure of Priam. This was found at a level quite inconsistent with the Trojan War, and rumors quickly spread that he had bought the pieces on the black market and put them together to make a synthetic hoard. The entries in his notebooks didn’t tally either.
    The discovery of the treasure of course made for a romantic story, and with it Schliemann found the fame he undoubtedly sought. However, the controversy surrounding the treasure has never gone away. It was looted in Berlin at the end of the Second World War and only recently put on display in Moscow.
    Nor was his reputation enhanced by his later digs at Mycenae. Here his achievement is more solid because little was known of the Mycenaean civilization at that point, and Schliemann uncovered a series of shaft graves and some wonderful gold ornaments “that are now the glory of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.” 29 Here too, however, the famous gold mask found in the fifth shaft grave does, for many people, bear a mustache that is particularly nineteenth-century in character.
    Schliemann dug elsewhere—at Tiryns, Orchomenos, and Crete—before returning in 1882 to Hissarlik. By now he had the sense to enlist a proper professional archaeologist as his assistant/partner, and it was this man, Wilhelm Dörpfeld (“Schliemann’s greatest find”), who had worked with Curtius at Olympia, who may well have found the real Troy. 30 In the spring of 1893, two years after Schliemann’s death (on December 26, in Naples), Dörpfeld opened up the southern side of Hissarlik and immediately struck walls far more magnificent than Schliemann had ever found, with a pronounced “batter” or angle, as mentioned in Homer (when Patroclus tries to scale the wall), together with an angular watchtower and two important gates. Inside were large, noble houses, from the layout of which he was able to deduce that they were arranged in concentric circles. No less important, Dörpfeld found everywhere the remains of Mycenaean pottery, exactly