The Sea-Kings of Crete

by James Baikie

Yet the beginnings of his career in the world were unromantic to the last degree. His father's poverty forced him to give up the hope of a learned life, and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a small grocer in a country village, in whose employment, surely uncongenial enough for such a spirit, he spent five and a half years, selling butter, herrings, potato-brandy and the like, and occupying his spare moments in tidying out the little shop. Even in such circumstances his passion for the Homeric story found means, sufficiently quaint, for its gratification. There came one evening to the shop a miller's man, who had been well educated, but had fallen into poor circumstances, and had taken to drink, yet even in his degradation had not forgotten his Homer. 'That evening,' says Schliemann, 'he recited to us about a hundred lines of the poet, observing the rhythmic cadence of the verses. Although I did not understand a syllable, the melodious sound of the words made a deep impression upon me, and I wept bitter tears over my unhappy fate. Three times over did I get him to repeat to me those divine verses, rewarding his trouble with three glasses of whisky, which I bought with the few pence that made up my whole wealth. From that moment I never ceased to pray God that by His grace I might yet have the happiness of learning Greek.'

To one whose heart was filled with such a passion for learning, no obstacle could prove insuperable. Yet for many a day the Fates seemed most unpropitious. Ill-health drove him to emigrate to Venezuela, but his ship was wrecked on the Dutch coast, and he became the errand-boy of a business house in Amsterdam. Here in his first year of service he managed, while going on his master's errands, to learn English in the first six months and French in the next, and incidentally to save for intellectual purposes one half of his salary of 800 francs. The mental training of the first year enabled him to learn Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese with much greater rapidity, each language being acquired in six weeks. In 1846 he was sent by another firm as their agent to St. Petersburg, where in the next year he founded a business house of his own, and from that time all went well with him. The Crimean War brought him opportunities which he utilized with such ingenuity as to derive considerable profit from them. By 1858 he considered that the fortune he had made was sufficient to warrant him in devoting himself entirely to archæology, and though exceptional circumstances obliged him to return to business for a little, he finally cut himself loose from it in 1863, and took up the task which was to occupy the remainder of his busy life.

WALLED PASSAGE IN WALL, TIRYNS (p. [49])

BEEHIVE TOMB (TREASURY OF ATREUS), MYCENÆ (p. [46])

His Greek studies had led him to two convictions on which his whole exploring work was based. First, that the site of ancient Troy was on the spot called in classical days New Ilium, the Hill of Hissarlik, near the coast of the Ægean; and second, that the Greek traveller, Pausanias, was right in stating that the murdered Agamemnon and his kin were buried within the walls of the Acropolis at Mycenæ, and not without it. In both these opinions he ran counter to the prevailing views of his time. It was generally believed that, if Troy had ever any real existence at all, its site was to be looked for not at Hissarlik, but far inland near Bunarbashi; while the authority of Pausanias as to the graves of the Atreidæ was held to be quite unreliable.

Schliemann resolved to put his convictions to the test of actual excavation. In April, 1870, he cut the first sod of his excavation at Hissarlik. The work went on with varying, but never brilliant, fortune, until the year 1873, when his faith and constancy began at last to meet with their reward. On the south-west of the site a great city gate was uncovered, lines of wall, already partly disclosed, began to show themselves more plainly, and quite close to the gate there was discovered the famous 'Treasure of Priam,' so called, a considerable mass of vessels and ornaments in gold and silver, with a number of spearheads, axes, daggers, and cups, wrought in copper. As the excavations progressed, it became evident that not one city, but many cities, had stood upon this ancient site. The First City, reached, of course, at the lowest level of the excavation, immediately above the virgin soil, belonged to a very early stage of human development. Its remains yielded such objects as stone axes and flint knives, together with the black, hand-made, polished pottery, known as 'bucchero,' which is characteristic of Neolithic sites in the Ægean, ornamented frequently with incised patterns which are filled in with a white chalky substance. The stratum of débris belonging to the First City averages about 8 feet in depth.

Above this lay a layer of soil about 1 foot 9 inches in depth, and then, on the top of a great layer of débris, by which the site had been levelled and extended, came the walls of the Second City. Here were the remains of a fortified gate with a ramp, paved with stone, leading up to it ([Plate II. 1]), and a strong wall of sun-dried brick resting upon a scarped stone substructure. This, with its projecting towers, had evidently once formed the enclosure of an Acropolis; and within the wall lay the remains of a large building which appeared to have been a house or palace. The separate finds included the great treasure already mentioned, and numerous other articles of use and adornment, golden hair-pins, bracelets, ear-pendants, a very primitive leaden idol of female form, and abundance of pottery, of which some specimens belong to the class of vases with long spouts, known to archæologists as 'Schnabelkanne,' or 'beak-jugs.' Above the stratum of the Second City lay the remains of no fewer than seven other settlements, more or less clearly marked, ending at the uppermost layer with the ruins of Roman Ilium, and its marble temple of Athena.

The gate and walls of the Second City—the fact that it had been undoubtedly destroyed by fire, and the evidence of wealth and artistic faculty offered by the golden treasure—seemed to Dr. Schliemann decisive evidence of the fact that this had been the Ilion of the Homeric poems. The treasure was named 'Priam's Treasure,' the largest building, 'Priam's Palace,' and the gate, 'The Scæan Gate.' It quickly became apparent, however, that the Second City could not claim Homeric honours, but must be of yet more venerable antiquity. The style, alike of the city buildings and of the articles found, was much too primitive for the Homeric period, and pointed to a date much earlier—probably, indeed, about a thousand years earlier than that of the Trojan War. The great treasure, whose workmanship seemed to militate against this conclusion, was suspected to have somehow slipped down during the excavations from the level of the Sixth City to that of the Second, as it seemed impossible that such fine work could belong to the very early period of the Burnt City; but subsequent discoveries, particularly those of Mr. Seager on the little island of Mokhlos, off the coast of Crete, have paralleled the splendour of the Trojan treasure with work which is undoubtedly of the same early date as the Second City, so that Schliemann's accuracy has been confirmed in this instance. The citadel itself seemed far too small to fill the place which Troy occupies in Homer's description, even allowing for poetic exaggeration. In 1890, the year of his death, Schliemann was on the way to the solution of the problem, and in 1892, his coadjutor, Professor Dörpfeld, finally proved that the Sixth City, lying four strata above Schliemann's Troy, was the true Ilion of the great epic. Its wider circuit had been missed by Schliemann in his earlier excavations owing to the fact that, at the centre of the site where he was working, the débris had been planed and levelled away by the Romans to make room for the buildings of their New Ilium. The pottery of the Sixth City was of the type which in the meantime had come to be called Mycenæan, from the discoveries in the plain of Argos, and its massive circuit wall, enclosing an area two and a half times greater than that of the Second City, is quite worthy of the fame of Homeric Troy. Without much risk of mistake, we may conclude that we have before us in [Plate III]. the actual wall from whose summit Andromache beheld the corpse of the gallant Hector dragged behind the chariot of his relentless foe. The mere fact of his having to some extent misinterpreted the evidence of his discoveries can scarcely be said, however, to take anything from the credit justly due to Schliemann. Had he been spared for but a year or two longer he could not have failed to complete his work, and to prove, as his fellow-worker did, that on the site which he had from the first contended to be that of Troy, there had stood a large and splendidly built city, which assuredly belongs to the period of the Trojan War.