In Search of the Trojan War (1985): Season 1, Episode 1 - The Age of the Heroes - full transcript

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In this place there once stood a city,

the most famous city in the world.

A city whose tragic fate has inspired
poets and artists for 3,000 years.

A city whose memory will outlive
the last trace of its physical existence.

A city called Troy.

But what happened here?
What lies beneath the legend of the Trojan War?

(CRASH OF THUNDER)

The story as we know it
is told by the poet Homer,

who may have lived around 700 BC,

500 years after the war
is supposed to have taken place.



It has been retold over the centuries.

It is a tale of love and war.

Long ago, a prince of Troy, Paris,

eloped with a Greek queen, Helen,
the most beautiful woman in the world,

He took her back to Troy,
a city by the Dardanelles in what is now Turkey,

where his father, Priam, was king.

The Greeks followed with a thousand ships
to take revenge.

Their leader was Agamemnon,
king of Mycenae, rich in gold.

For 10 years they fought in the plain
before the city.

The heroes of both sides were killed.
The Greek Achilles, the gallant Trojan Hector.

The city was finally entered
by the trick of the wooden horse,

inside which the Greeks hid armed men.

Troy was burned, its people slaughtered,

sharing the fate of all victims of war.



Berlin, February 1945.

Here took place what is so far
the last act in the destruction of Troy.

And here, 40 years on, my search started.

Berlin had been famous
for the arts of civilisation.

Its museum buildings,
now gutted by the fires of war,

had been the greatest centre
of classical scholarship in the 19th century.

Here, the rediscovery of Homer

and the beginnings of archaeology
had gone hand in hand.

That November day I went
to the Charlottenburg Museum in West Berlin,

drawn by the lure of the man who,
it is commonly said, discovered Troy.

Heinrich Schliemann, father of archaeology,
genius, romantic, liar...

No one is sure how to take him nowadays.

In 1886, four years before he died,

Schliemann gave his Trojan finds,
including a priceless gold treasure,

to the Berlin museum.

Here it was displayed
until the Second World War.

- Is there much of it?
- Difficult to say.

That afternoon, Dr Klaus Goldman showed me
the remnants from Troy which survived 1945.

After the bombs, German archaeologists
had to excavate these things a second time

from the debris of their own museum.

The gold alone escaped but has never
been seen since. Only replicas remain.

So these are copies of the actual gold pieces
Schliemann found at Troy?

(GOLDMAN) Copies of the gold objects
which were missed from World War II on.

The originals are...?

- Nobody knows.
- OK.

To fight to save these fragments
when our own civilisation is in ruins around us

is to make a statement of faith in
the achievements of human kind, however small.

We preserve even a single piece of pot
for what it may tell future generations,

carefully painted by a Bronze Age Greek
before it was traded to Troy.

Perhaps then the Greeks and Trojans
had even been friends.

Most people who fight wars can be
the best friends several years later.

- Or before!
- Or before, yes.

And the fire marks, you don't know whether
it's the Second World War or the Trojan War!

Maybe the Second World War.

These all too human artefacts,

with their burn marks separated
by three or four thousand years,

were found in the ruins of a real place
which we now call Troy.

And what of the man who found them,
now commonly branded as a crook,

Schliemann himself?

He was one of the greatest archaeologists

because nobody believed that Troy
has been a real place in history.

And Schliemann did believe it,

excavated the place that was Troy,
in historic terms too.

And so he, I think,
opened a new chapter in history, in archaeology.

He was a very great man.

(MARCHING BAND PLAYS)

That day in Berlin, it seemed,

the Troy story was part of
the remorseless march of history,

not a fairy tale but a real story with real people.

It was almost as if ghosts
were waiting to be summoned.

Schliemann would only be the first.
In this series there are many chapters,

leading from Berlin to Troy and Mycenae,

across Europe from Ireland to Armenia
and eventually back to Berlin.

A search in which major discoveries
have been made in the last few months.

Each generation of archaeologists
has made a different version of the tale of Troy.

But is the tale true?

To even attempt to find answers,
the first step had to be Schliemann.

He defined the search,
fired the generations who came after him

with his romantic faith
in the truth of Homer's "Iliad".

His obsession with Troy started, he claimed,

with this picture in a book given by his father
at Christmas 1830, when he was eight.

Its childlike vision of the Trojan tragedy, he said,

made finding the city the goal of his life.

All he did later was to that end.

A business career took him from
the California gold rush to the Crimean War

and made him a million by the time he was 30.

Even his love life became a step
towards that ultimate goal of proving Homer true,

in his second marriage
to the 16-year-old Sophie,

a Greek girl who knew her Homer
and who would accompany him on his quest.

Schliemann has sold us all his fairy tale.

The people who knew him
are divided over his character.

Some thought him cheery, kindly,
always ready for new facts.

Others said he was dogmatic,
devious, and even a liar and a cheat.

He himself, retrospectively,

liked to think of himself as a solitary,
romantic figure with Troy as his ultimate goal.

And yet in all the 60,000 letters
and papers that survive of his,

there is no mention of the Trojan obsession
until he reaches the age of 46.

Then he wanted to get out of business
and into some scientific field.

What, he didn't know,
and he thought it was too late.

But he enrolled as a mature student in Paris.

He enrolled in a new science in which
an amateur could possibly make a mark.

A new science engendered by a dramatic change
in people's attitude to the past - archaeology.

At that moment, 1859, the publication
of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species"

signalled a scientific revolution,
not only in geology and natural history

but also in human history.

The Bible could no longer contain
the answers to man's past.

A vast and mysterious pre-history
lay waiting to be uncovered by the spade.

But where did the new science stand
when Schliemann began?

I went to Cambridge to ask
the professor of archaeology, Colin Renfrew.

When Schliemann began his work in Greece,

then it was 10 or 15 years
since man's antiquity had been established.

One thinks of that happening in about 1859.

Up to that time, the biblical view was followed

that the world was created in seven days.

Some scholars had calculated that
to be in the year 4004 BC.

So there wasn't a pre-history to speak of.

The word "pre-history" wasn't invented
till about 1865.

So it's all the time that Schliemann was young,

the time he was starting his work
the following decade in Greece.

He was criticised by some of the professional
scholars who didn't approve of this amateur,

but I'm sure he was as good as they were
and he was opening up this new field.

So he's a towering figure
whereas they're forgotten.

But where would Schliemann look for his Troy?

He owed the idea which brought him
world fame to a now forgotten figure

who literally told him where to dig.

An elusive Englishman whose shadowy face
peers from indistinct photos.

Frank Calvert, United States consul
in north-western Turkey,

knew the region's history better than anyone.

It was Calvert who persuaded Schliemann

to try to prove the existence
of Homer's Troy by excavation.

Early in 1870,

this middle-aged retired businessman
arrived in Istanbul, then the capital of Turkey.

After a lifetime playing the markets of the world,

Schliemann was about to engage
in the riskiest speculation of his life.

From Istanbul he sailed through
the Sea of Marmara to the Dardanelles.

In the north-eastern corner of the Aegean Sea

was believed to be the site of Homer's Troy.

That April, he entered
Homer's swift-flowing Hellespont.

From now on, Homer would be his guide book.

Following in his footsteps,
it was easy to feel his excitement.

"Now," he wrote, "I hope finally to resolve
the great riddle as to where Troy was."

The age of archaeology was about to begin.

Canakkale in Asia.

Since medieval times, travellers had
come through here looking for Troy.

French, Venetian, English
had walked these streets, Homer in hand,

under the gaze of amused locals,
buying provisions, hiring transport,

before heading south in search of Troy.

The exact site of the lost city
had long been the subject of controversy.

Its general location
had never been in any doubt -

somewhere above the flat green plain
at the mouth of the Dardanelles.

In the ancient world it was believed that Troy lay
under a little Roman town, New Ilium,

which stood at the end of a long ridge,
pointing down the plain towards the sea.

In modern times, this idea fell out of favour.

But at a hill called Hisarlik,
Frank Calvert had found deep remains

below the Roman foundations.

This was where he persuaded Schliemann
to look for Troy.

And in 1870, this was where Schliemann came.

In this place, the ancients believed,
Troy had stood.

Here, one said, no stone is without a name.

"I confess," wrote Schliemann,
"that I could hardly control my emotions.

"Its image had haunted my childhood dreams.

"But did Helen stand on these walls
and watch the heroes die for her?

"Did Achilles drag dead Hector here in the dust,

"the wooden horse bring down
on the city a whirlwind of doom?

"I was convinced this was the place,"
wrote Schliemann.

"'Iliad' in hand I sat and imagined
the armies marching on the plain.

"The fleet, the camp,
the fortress of Troy on Hisarlik.

"For two hours the events
of the 'Iliad' passed before my eyes

"until hunger and darkness forced me to leave."

But did Troy ever exist in reality
and did it stand here?

Schliemann first put spade
into Hisarlik in April 1870.

The hill was about 700 feet square,
130 feet above the plain.

Calvert had told him
that the hill was composed of debris,

in layer upon layer up to 50 feet deep.

So, assuming Homer's Troy
must be deep down near the bedrock,

Schliemann decided on a simple
but brutal method of finding it.

From the beginning, Calvert counselled
Schliemann to go carefully

and dig a network of small trenches.

But convinced that Homer's Troy
must lie deep inside the hill,

Schliemann attacked it with over 100 workmen,

armed with pickaxes, wheelbarrows,
windlasses, chains and battering rams,

to drive a terrific hole into Hisarlik.

This is Schliemann's great trench today,
like a bomb site.

You can still walk
right into the heart of the mound

without encountering any architectural detail.

Architectural detail there was, though.

He describes a prehistoric building
20 feet deep with 10-feet-high walls

made of squared blocks of limestone,
beautifully smoothed.

All of which he destroyed.

But searching for a Troy
that looked like Homer's Troy,

Schliemann pressed on deeper into Hisarlik.

In the course of three seasons,
Schliemann identified four main cities

superimposed one upon the other
below the Roman.

But Homer's city
did not appear to be among them.

What pottery he found was primitive.

Strange two-handled cups were
the nearest to anything Homer mentioned.

But these were gritty clay, not silver or gold.

The deeper he dug,
the more his worst fears grew.

"Perhaps Troy is not here after all!"
he confided to his diary.

Then, deep in the mound...

30 feet below the Roman city,
he came across the ruins of a prehistoric citadel.

It had a paved ramp leading up to a gate
set in a massive fortification wall.

"Perhaps," he thought,
"this was Homer's Scaean Gate,

"through which Hector had spurred
his chariot down from Priam's palace."

The place was tiny, only 100 yards across,

but it lay covered in a mass of charred debris.

It had been destroyed by war.

If the city had existed, then this must be it.

Schliemann announced to the world
that he had found Homer's Troy.

"Troy's not large," he said,
"but Homer is a poet, not a historian.

"He had never seen it, but Hisarlik
is the site of the citadel of Priam.

"I have opened up a new world for archaeology."

Publicly applauded,
Schliemann was privately unhappy.

"After long searching," he wrote, "I admit
I have not succeeded in making the debris

"agree with historical chronology."

Now, with hindsight, we can see why.

With the aid of a computer,
let's put ourselves in Schliemann's shoes.

There was a logic
to the way he had tackled the hill.

He'd read the classical sources very carefully.

The tradition was that the Roman city
of Ilium, the Greek Ilion,

whose location had never been doubted,
stood on the site of Troy.

Schliemann could expect near the top
to find a Roman city.

That's exactly what he had.
There, in yellow, is the city wall of Ilium

and the temple precinct
visited by Julius Caesar and Constantine.

Below that he thought there'd be a Greek city,
the one visited by Alexander the Great.

Again he had it. He demolished
its northern circuit as he went through.

Below that, he expected to find
a Lydian city, from Homer's own lifetime.

There were two main phases to this.
He had little idea of what this was really about.

Again he demolished its northern circuit.

But if the logic of the sequences
in the ancient sources was right,

then below these ought to be Homer's Troy.

Sure enough, he came upon the greatest
of the prehistoric settlements, Troy II.

Tiny as it was, that was the one
he thought was Homer's.

It's wrong to think
he was engaging in fantasy.

He had worked it out
as far as his evidence permitted -

that is, without pottery to make the dating secure.

But when you consider what we now know
about this site, its incredible maze of ruins,

over 50 layers making up nine major settlements

going back 5,000 years of human habitation,

it helps us to understand
why poor old Schliemann found such difficulty

in untangling the mysteries of Hisarlik.

By 1873, Schliemann had removed
tonnes of debris from the hill of Hisarlik

and was deeply disappointed
by his unimpressive finds.

Critics said Priam's palace would be
more believable as Priam's pigsty.

In the cold light of day,
it did not fit Homer's story.

Schliemann was worried
about his health in "this pestilential plain".

He suffered bouts of malaria
and depression with premonitions of death.

"The difficulties of excavating
in this wilderness are immense," he wrote,

"and increase day by day.
My dear wife is present from morning till night."

He decided to call the whole thing off
in mid-June 1873.

And then, on May 31st, came a twist of fate

which Schliemann seemed to conjure
out of nothing.

It appeared to Schliemann's suggestible mind
a gift from the gods.

Schliemann claimed he and Sophie
had found a stone-lined chamber

in the debris of the burned city.

There, in a copper cauldron were gold, silver
and bronze vessels, bronze lance heads,

several thousand gold rings and earrings,

bracelets and necklaces,
and two splendid diadems,

one of which comprised 16,000 pieces of gold.

It was with this last
that he later bedecked his wife, Sophie.

Could they not be the jewels of Helen herself?

For the romantic Schliemann,
past and present had momentarily merged.

The past, Homer's past, had come to life.

Had the jewels really framed
"the face that launched a thousand ships"?

Were the ashes heaped around them
really the debris of the Trojan War?

No. They were not only too early,
they were 1,000 years too early.

Schliemann had dug far too deep,
as observers told him at the time.

Frank Calvert brilliantly observed

that he had a gap in his finds
covering the very period he wanted,

the period of the Trojan War.

Schliemann called his critics libellers and liars

but he was perplexed.

The following year, when he published his finds,

he included an enormous atlas
of photographs, plans and maps.

This copy came
to the John Rylands Library in Manchester.

In it, he asks "That my colleagues may explain
to me all the things that I found obscure

"because everything there
appeared to me strange and mysterious."

But there is another question to ask
of Priam's treasure.

Was it even genuine? It is now widely
believed that Schliemann faked it.

Unfortunately, the treasure itself
is no longer available as evidence.

Early in 1945, as Berlin burned, it vanished.

It has never been seen since,

though it is rumoured to survive
in a private collection in the West.

But was it genuine? And was it found at Troy?

Schliemann's accounts contradict each other,

and it's now known that Sophie
was not present as he alleged.

But at Cambridge, Donald Easton,
who's examined Schliemann's dig notebooks,

believes he has solved the mystery
of Schliemann's discovery.

He was a fantasy merchant in some ways.

That comes out in other aspects of his life,
in his records of his travels, for instance.

That's been quite well documented.

You've got to expect always to find
some discrepancies and inconsistencies

in the notebook of any archaeologist.

You shouldn't lean too heavily on such things.

As regards Priam's treasure,
despite all the hoo-ha there's been recently,

it's almost certain that it was found
as a single hoard,

although it's perfectly true
that Sophie wasn't there at the time.

It wasn't an abandoned treasure chest.

It seems now that it was dug down
into the deposits of Troy II

from a later period as a tomb.

These were grave goods
that somebody deposited in Troy III or IV.

So you defend him against his detractors?

On this particular point, yes.

It's clear that he didn't have the time
to look at the treasure in any great detail

and therefore if there are a few discrepancies
or things omitted or wrongly described

in that very brief and garbled account,
it's not at all surprising.

But some of his interpretations
on the grand scale were absolutely right

because, for instance,
what he identified as prehistoric material,

and which nobody else had come across,
IS prehistoric material. He was right.

What he identified as Mycenaean material
IS Mycenaean material.

So on these very broad questions
of interpretation he could be dead right.

He stuck to his guns in the teeth of opposition.

And he did have the one great scoop -

he actually found
a late Bronze Age citadel in the right place,

that is to say, underneath classical Ilium.

And the reason he found that
was that he had the guts, he had the drive

and he had the money to get out there and dig.

After the sensation of the jewels of Helen,
where would Schliemann dig now?

With Homer as his guide,
the answer was obvious.

If all Homer was true,

then Agamemnon and the Greek heroes
who had sacked Troy must also be real people.

Across the Aegean in Greece lay the fortress
where legend said Agamemnon was buried -

Golden Mycenae.

And to Mycenae Schliemann turned next.

Unlike Troy, the site of Mycenae
had never been forgotten.

Its ruins still stood above ground and had been
described by many earlier visitors.

Here was a mysterious gate
still adorned with headless stone lions,

perhaps, it was thought,
the badge of Agamemnon's family.

Nearby were gigantic tombs,

their vaulted roofs the most tremendous
monuments of the European Bronze Age.

Since the ancient travel writer Pausanias,

these extraordinary remains had intrigued
all the searchers who had come here

looking for truth behind Homer's tale.

"I arrived here on 7th of August, 1876,"
wrote Schliemann,

"by the same road as Pausanias describes.

"The situation of Mycenae",
he adds with typical enthusiasm,

"is beautifully described by Homer,
'deep in the depths of horse-feeding Argos.'"

Like many travellers who had
visited Greece since independence,

Schliemann approached Mycenae
as a pilgrim, in a mood of veneration.

(CLOCK TICKS)

The night before he first set eyes on it,
he slept on a wooden bench in a wretched inn,

pestered by mosquitoes,
but oblivious to the discomfort

as he contemplated the gigantic figures
of the Greek heroes in this memorable place.

Heroes who murdering and murdered
were sacrificed to their inexorable fate.

Now Schliemann would surpass
his fellow romantics.

At Mycenae he would literally bring
"the age of heroes" back to life.

Schliemann's theory was simple.

Pausanias said that Agamemnon
and his murdered companions

were buried within the walls.

It was assumed he meant
the outer walls of the lower city.

But Schliemann thought they'd been
buried inside the citadel itself.

The scholars laughed.

But in the autumn of 1876, he started
a great trench just inside the Lion Gate

across a terraced area
which looked as if it had been levelled long ago.

Immediately he came across
a circle of standing stones.

Inside it were what looked like
the remains of tombstones,

carved with chariots and fighting men.

He dug deeper and found the tops
of five shafts sunk into the bedrock.

At the bottom were some of the greatest finds
ever made in archaeology.

In those shafts were the remains
of bronze-clad royalty from the heroic age.

Men, women and children.

They were literally covered in gold.

Here too were the first signs
seen by modern man

of a heroic world which might be
reflected in Homer's "Iliad".

Studded swords
like the one Hector gave to Ajax.

A dagger blade inlaid with a scene showing
tower shields like those described by Homer.

There were wonderfully worked gold ornaments
covering the head and chest,

extraordinary finger rings exquisitely engraved.

Schliemann had no doubt that he had
discovered here in the shaft graves

the world of Homer, the world of the "Iliad".

Everything fitted. Pausanias said there were
five graves and Schliemann had found five.

The legend even required
Cassandra's two babies to be buried with her

and Schliemann had found two infants
leafed in gold.

But here in the fifth grave,
as with the jewels of Helen of Troy,

Schliemann found what he had
above all wished to find.

There were three male bodies down there
with gilt war gear,

gold adornments on their breasts and gold masks.

When the mask was lifted off the first one,
the skull crumbled into dust.

The same happened with the second one.

But with the third one, when the mask was lifted,
as Schliemann himself tells the story,

"The round face, with all its flesh,
was wonderfully preserved

"underneath the ponderous golden mask.

"There was no trace of hair
but the eyes were perfectly visible

"and the mouth was wide open
owing to the great weight pressed upon it,

"revealing 32 beautiful teeth

"which led the physicians who examined the body

"to believe that the man had died
at the early age of 35."

Schliemann, so the story has it,
picked up the mask and kissed it.

That evening he sent
the king of Greece a telegram.

"I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon!"

Professor George Mylonas,
the modern excavator of Mycenae,

shares his predecessor's faith
in the Homeric tradition.

There's no doubt that the finds do exist,
that the things were there,

that he found those graves.

Everything else he does
all comes out of his faith, his unique faith,

in the historicity of Homer
and of the ancient authorities.

- Do you believe in the Trojan War?
- There's no doubt in my mind.

I have lived in these hills

and looked at those stones
for almost a quarter of a century.

They say that it might be sort of a myth,

that all the long years of siege
is something impossible.

I want you to look at those walls from outside.

These stone walls
average a thickness of 14 feet.

Imagine an army that's not equipped with guns

but is equipped only with swords
made of bronze or bows and arrows.

How could they hope to carry a place like that?

The only way to take this place
was by a long siege

that would deprive water and supplies.

That's what happened in Troy.
Troy was a fortified citadel.

Not perhaps as strong walled, but still walled.

You could only capture it by siege.

Do you believe a king called Agamemnon
took a force from here?

Absolutely. Agamemnon
is my long-lost relative!

I believe... Sometimes I come
by myself during the night

and converse with him, as a matter of fact!

It's a marvellous feeling to have this feeling again

of certainty that those things that you are around
had life once upon a time.

Was the man behind the mask
really Agamemnon? Again, alas, no.

We can't even be sure he was Greek.

The graves didn't date from the same time.

They'd been added to over a century.
There weren't even five.

A sixth turned up almost as soon as
Schliemann stopped digging.

And the date was obvious
to those experts studying the pottery -

it was two or three hundred years
before the Trojan War, let's say about 1500 BC.

For Schliemann the most disturbing fact
was that in all these finds

there was nothing to connect with Troy.

That was what drove him back to Troy
in 1878, in 1879, in '81 and '82.

Full of doubts, trekking round the Troad,

even looking for a possible other site
for Troy, but to no avail.

In fact, his next triumph
was back on the mainland,

in the company of a man who revolutionised
Schliemann's ideas about archaeology,

a man who gave him what he'd lacked before -
an architect's eye.

His name was Wilhelm Dörpfeld.

Dörpfeld will turn out to be
a key figure in our search.

A 30-year-old architect,
he complemented Schliemann's eye for objects

with an uncanny ability
to untangle building structures.

In 1884, the two set out for a site
famous in Homer's tale of Troy -

"Tiryns of the great walls",
the fortress of Hercules.

Tiryns rises like a ship from the plain of Argos,

nine miles south of Mycenae
and a mile from the sea.

From here, says the "Iliad",
King Diomedes led 80 black ships to Troy.

At Tiryns, Schliemann at last touched
on the palace civilisation

which had existed in around 1300 BC,

the date he and Dörpfeld
established from numerous finds

of what was now known to be
Bronze Age Mycenaean pottery.

They were found in the ruins
of a prehistoric palace on top of Tiryns

with fragments of wall paintings
from the heroic age.

For the first time, the modern world
looked on the faces of people

who had lived at the time of the Trojan War.

"The age of the heroes" had come alive.

With his digs at Mycenae and Tiryns,
Schliemann had proved

that, however distantly, the world of Homer
reflected a world that had actually existed.

And that places Homer says
were important were indeed,

no matter how insignificant they'd been later.

Schliemann followed up this hunch,
still using Homer.

He looked in vain for the palace
of King Nestor at Pylos,

for the palace of Helen herself at Sparta.

He hoped to find clues to the origin
of his Mycenaean civilisation.

There he looked to Crete
and to a site already exposed at Knossos

where he hoped writing might be found.

But he was unable to buy the site.

But the central riddle of his career remained.

Where was the Trojan War?

The more he found on the mainland,
the less his tiny Troy II seemed to fit.

There was no resemblance of material culture

and no trace of the pottery
he now knew to be Mycenaean.

So the quest that had been engendered
in the mind of the seven-year-old child,

as he says it, still confronted
the 67-year-old man.

In 1890, Schliemann headed back to Hisarlik
for the 12th time in 20 years,

the riddle still gnawing at him.

As he went over his excavation notes,
something didn't fit.

And now he took a different tack.

He chose to dig
outside the area he had ransacked,

outside what he had said
for so long was Homer's Troy.

Why?

Had he perhaps racked his brains
back to those early destructive days

when he had demolished limestone walls
along the north of Hisarlik?

Whatever the reason, to the end
the old man remained a searcher.

"I wish I could prove Homer to have been
an eye-witness of the Trojan War," he wrote.

"But I cannot. But had Troy been
merely this small fortified place,

"a few hundred men
would have sufficed to take it

"and Homer's story would be exposed
as a total fiction."

Was that the truth
of his long and costly obsession?

Had the city only ever existed
in the poet's imagination?

Then Schliemann made perhaps the most
important discovery he ever made at Troy.

It wasn't gold or treasure,

but it gave him the connection
he'd searched for for so long,

the connection between the world here at Troy

and the world he'd discovered
in Greece at Mycenae.

And he found it not within the city

but 25 yards outside the walls
of what he thought was Homer's Troy.

Here, Schliemann and Dörpfeld
uncovered at an unexpectedly high level -

because for Schliemann
everything had to be deep -

a house, a grand house,

which immediately in their eyes
resembled the royal palace at Tiryns.

And, better still, inside it were
masses of Mycenaean pottery,

exactly the kind they'd found
at Mycenae and Tiryns,

the key in the dating of this search
for them, just as they are for us today.

This was a shattering revelation

because the Troy that Schliemann
thought was Homer's

dated from 1,000 years before this,

and the Troy with Mycenaean contacts,
which Homer's Troy would be,

was somewhere outside it and undiscovered.

What a blow that must have been to the old man.

He knew now that he'd destroyed much
of the evidence not just for himself but for ever.

But he resolved to go back the following year,
hoping he could solve the riddle.

"It is not too late," he wrote,

But the gods, as fie would have said,
did not allow it.

On Christmas Day, 1890, he died
in Naples, worn out by Troy itself.

He was taken back to his beloved Athens,
his adopted home, for burial

Schliemann's tomb lies
in the first cemetery of Athens,

adorned with scenes
of the heroes Hector and Achilles

fighting in front of sacred Ilios.

Alongside them in death,
that latter-day hero Schliemann himself,

Homer in hand, Sophie devoted by his side,

together conquering new worlds
for the imagination.

Schliemann's house still stands in Athens.

His ghost is still there too.

"To make my beloved Greece live again,"
he said, "all I did was to that end."

The new science of archaeology did not
escape such feelings. How could it?

In a sense, it is the most romantic of sciences,

for we would have it
physically restore to us the lost past.

"My work", he wrote, "will remain
as long as there are admirers of Homer.

"As long as this globe will be inhabited by men.

"Know yourself."

But had the Trojan War ever happened?

In our search we will see
how Schliemann's successors -

more scientific but no less romantic than he -

tried to prove that Homer's tale was,
after all, the truth.

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