The Historians' History of the World 04

Heinrich Schliemann

was born at Neu-Buckow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, January 6, 1822; died at Naples, December 27, 1890. He was in many ways a most extraordinary man. He was largely denied the advantages of an early liberal education, as it became necessary for him to earn his way in the world while yet a boy, but he made amends for this by putting into practice a most amazing system of self-education, through which he had been able to acquire an entire mastery of a list of languages only limited by his own desires. French, Italian, Spanish, English, Russian,—he learned one after another in periods of only a few months for each; but not till relatively late in life, at thirty-five namely, did he take up the study of Greek. The reason for this delay, as he himself explained it, was that his interest in Grecian history had always been so intense that he dared not take up the study of the language lest it should prove a distraction detrimental to his business. But now he had followed out that business so persistently that he had become a wealthy man and could afford to do as he wished. He acquired Greek as quickly and as completely as he had acquired other languages, beginning with the modern Greek and passing back in inverse chronological order to the various classical authors. He learned not merely to read the language, but to write it with facility and speak it fluently, so that he could express himself in either modern or ancient Greek almost as readily as in his native tongue.

This accomplished, he had prepared the way for an attempt which, as he believed in later years, had been an ambition with him all his life,—the search, namely, for the site of Ancient Troy. Having amassed a fortune, the income from which was more than sufficient for all his needs, he retired from active participation in business and devoted the remainder of his life to a self-imposed task. How well he succeeded, all the world knows. In opposition to the opinions of many scholars he picked on the hill of Hissarlik as the site of ancient Ilium, and his excavations there soon demonstrated that at least it had been the site, not of one alone, but of at least seven different cities in antiquity—one being built above the ruins of another at long intervals of time. One of these cities, the sixth from the top,—or, to put it otherwise, the most ancient but one,—was, he became firmly convinced, Ilium itself.

The story of his achievements has already been told. But it is necessary here to point the warning that Dr. Schliemann’s excavations—wonderful as are their results—do not, perhaps, when critically viewed, demonstrate quite so much as might at first sight appear. There is, indeed, a high degree of probability that the city which he excavated was really the one intended in the Homeric descriptions, but it must be clear, to anyone who scrutinises the matter somewhat closely, that this fact goes but a little way towards substantiating the Homeric narrative as a whole. The city of Ilium may have existed without giving rise to any such series of events as that narrated in the Iliad

. Dr. Schliemann himself was led to realise this fact, and to modify somewhat, in later years, the exact tenor of some of his more enthusiastic earlier views, yet the fact remains that the excavations at Hissarlik must be reckoned with by whoever in future discusses the status of the Homeric story.

If they did not prove as much as some could wish, they at least were enormously suggestive. Had they done nothing else, they at least furnished a mass of authentic documents bearing upon the life of the prehistoric period of Grecian antiquity. Even more important in this regard were the excavations of Dr. Schliemann subsequently made at the sites of the old Greek cities of Mycenæ and Tiryns. Ilium was not located on Grecian soil, and its relation with Grecian history was only conjectural, but these other cities were in Greece itself, and inspection of their ruins has brought within the historic period some centuries of Grecian life that hitherto were utterly obscure, or only known through incidental references of the Homeric poems.

Schlosser, F. C., Weltgeschichte, Frankfort, 1844.

Friedlich Christoph Schlosser, born at Jever, Germany, November 17, 1776; died at Heidelberg, September 23, 1861, the Nestor of German historians has been spoken of—not unjustly—as the German Tacitus. More than almost any other man, perhaps, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he was influential in establishing the school of what may be called scientific history, not merely through his Writings but through his personal influence on a coterie of pupils who included many of the distinguished historians of the middle of the nineteenth century.