Troy—O horror!—the common grave of Europe and Asia,
Troy—the untimely tomb of all heroes and heroic deeds.
LXVIIIA.
[69] Herodotus. Book VII, 43.
[70] Troy, or Ilium, as the excavations of Schliemann and Dörpfeld have shown, was destroyed and rebuilt no fewer than seven times. During the Roman period it was known as Ilium Novum and was honored as the city of Æneas and consequently, as the parent of Rome. It was because of this fabulous origin of the Romans that Constantine first planned to establish the seat of empire on the plain of Troy instead of locating it on the site occupied by Byzantium between the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. Fortunately he gave his preference to the spot where has since stood the noble city which still bears his name.
Ilium Novum was for a long time the seat of a bishopric, but, since it was plundered by the Turks, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, it has lain in ruins.
For illuminating accounts of Schliemann’s epoch-making investigations see, besides the Troja above mentioned, his Troy and its Remains (New York, 1876); Ilios, the City and Country of the Trojans (New York, 1881); and Schuchhardt’s work already quoted.
Dr. Schliemann has justly been acclaimed the creator of prehistoric Greek archæology. “He has introduced,” writes Oxford’s distinguished Orientalist, “a new era into the study of classical antiquity, has revolutionized our conceptions of the past, has given the impulse to that ‘research of the spade’ which is producing such marvelous results throughout the Orient and nowhere more than in Greece itself. The light has broken over the peaks of Ida and the long-forgotten ages of prehistoric Hellas and Asia Minor are lying bathed in it before us. We now begin to know how Greece came to have the strength and will for that mission of culture to which we of this modern world are still indebted. We can penetrate into a past of which Greek tradition had forgotten the very existence. By the side of one of the jade axes which Dr. Schliemann has uncovered at Hissarlik, the Iliad itself is but a thing of yesterday. We are carried back to a time when the empires of the Assyrians and the Hittites did not as yet exist, when the Aryan forefathers of the Greeks had not as yet, perhaps, reached their new home in the south, but when the rude tribes of the neolithic age had already begun to traffic and barter, and travelling caravans conveyed the precious stone of the Kuen-lun from one extremity of Asia to another. Prehistoric archæology in general owes as much to Dr. Schliemann’s discoveries as the study of Greek history and Greek art.” Professor A. H. Sayce, in the introduction to Dr. Schliemann’s Troja, pp. viii, ix.
[71] According to Suetonius and Horace both Julius Cæsar and Augustus, like Constantine the Great, contemplated making Ilium—Troy—the capital of the Roman Empire.
Lucan not only makes Julius visit the Ilium of his day and “each story’d place survey”—