Homer’s poem The Iliad depicts a war between Greeks and Hittite-related Trojans 3000 years ago. Like the lost city of Atlantis, eccentrics long sought the “real” Troy. Most ambitious was Prussian millionaire Heinrich Schliemann. He didn’t believe in God but pursued his faith in Homer with religious zeal.
Schliemann made a vast fortune in Czarist Russia and the California Gold Rush. He was no angel, sometimes lying and cheating to get ahead. Retired at 36, he earned a Ph.D. and self-financed his lifelong obsession: proving that Homer’s Iliad was historic fact.
Archaeologists doubted that Troy even existed. Others debated Turkish sites from the comfort of their armchairs in Europe. But Heinrich Schliemann put boots on the ground in 1870, in large-scale excavations over 20 years.
He hoped Pınarbaşı was the location, but colleague Frank Calvert pointed to a tall mound at Hisarlik. Their methods were crude, but quickly unearthed ancient treasures. Comparing them to the Iliad, Schliemann was convinced. He announced the discovery of historic Troy to a breathless press corps.
The fanciful claim was naturally condemned by experts. The layer he called Troy was a 3rd-class city unworthy of a foreign invasion. Author D.F. Easton says he was called “a psychopath” who had “no idea…of the meaning of his excavations.” And these insults came in the 1980s!
Except that our man Schliemann … was right. In the Nineties Manfred Korfmann’s excavations found that his claimed Trojan layer was 15-times larger than others assumed—a major city destroyed by siege warfare, with unburied skeletons and alien Greek arrowheads in the city walls. The leading view today? The Iliad dramatizes actual events in time and space. Friedrich Schlieman…wasn’t so dumb after all.
I’m Jeff Gentry
Best reference:
Easton, D. F. (1998). Heinrich Schliemann: Hero or Fraud? The Classical World, 91(5), 335–343. https://doi.org/10.2307/4352102
Dumb Ideas that Changed the World copyright 2024 by Jeff Gentry. All rights reserved.