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?
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 famous 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?
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.
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 "lliad".
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,
western 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 llium,
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.
"Lts 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.
"'Lliad' 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 'lliad' 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 as we seen
was that the Roman city of llium, the Greek llion,
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 llium
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 llium.
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.
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 "lliad".
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 "lliad".
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 hair but the eyes were perfectly visible
"and the mouth was wide open owing to the weight 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 Dorpfeld.
Dorpfeld 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 "lliad", 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 Dorpfeld 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 Dorpfeld
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 he 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 llios.
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.