Enthralled by the Schliemanns of Troy

In the Iliad there is a tension between Glory and Tragedy which wrestles the reader from awe to sorrow. Heroes vie for fame in posterity by the courage and valour of their actions.

It is wonderful to suspend modern presumptions and take up those of a fanciful and glorious ancient world. The images conjured from reading the epics are so seductively absorbing, I feel as if I were there in the thick of the action, fighting as an Argive. A neophyte, a youth amongst the rank and file in the thick of battle under the confident command of, say, a Ulysses or Diomedes. Amongst the lances and the letting of the combatants’ life blood, and the horror of clashing shields of bronze, daubed with gore and prickled with arrows. What would it have been like to witness the mighty sword strokes of gods and demigods, besides me as the battle roared all around?

The epic of the Iliad is a mighty work; timeless because of its lyrical flow, riveting actions and moving heroics. I only wish I could read it in its archaic Greek.

Sarpedon's words, Book XIII:
Could all our care elude the gloomy grave,
Which claims no less the fearful and the brave,
For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war.
But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
Disease, and death's inexorable doom
The life, which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe;
Brave though we fall, and honour'd if we live,
Or let us glory gain, or glory give!  

Gloriously written indeed.

Recently, I was enthralled by a book: The Schliemanns of Troy (One Passion, Two Loves). It tells the phenomenal story of a couple who endeavoured to discover the mythological city of Troy. I picked the book from off my parents’ shelf, enticed by its binding and its frontispiece which had an image of Sophia Schliemann adorned with the most regal jewellery. These jewels in the image fall from her forehead, down the outside of her ears and dangle from her lobes to conjoin over her bust. The Schliemanns themselves had unearthed these jewels and they named them Priam’s Treasure (although not actually Priam’s). It is an Olympian object of immeasurable value, dripping gold with over a thousand intricate pieces of the most accomplished craftsmanship. But this is just one of the thousands of artefacts they uncovered from a mound called Hissarlik in Ottoman Turkey (near the Dardenelles, or Hellespont of old). This jewel, this Priam’s Treasure which Sophia wore so spectacularly, is a talisman to their tale – an ultimate testament.

Who was Heinrich Schliemann? He was a man of brilliance and ferocity. A man of astounding intensity and imperious impatience. From nothing he accumulated a vast fortune, dealing mostly in commodities, he ventured and profited in international markets, from the gold rush in California to the Crimean war. During those years, throughout his restless and itinerant business schedule, extensively colouring himself by voyaging the cultures and sights of the world, he acquired more than a dozen languages and built a vast compendium of erudite knowledge. But what is fascinating about Heinrich was that all his acquisitions, all his wealth, was for one purpose, the discovery of Homeric Troy.

As a boy in a quiet hinterland of Germany he was first awakened to the mystery and awe that was the myth of Troy by his pastor father. Somewhat an amateur intellectual himself, he recounted the strife and tragedy of the Iliad to his son. From the very beginning Heinrich came out for the Trojan cause, which is indicative to the nature of his heart, since he was not swept up as so many are by the rage of Achilles. Not for Heinrich and this is perhaps begins to reveal his sympathetic and romantic character.

Heinrich was enamoured by the tale of Troy as much as he was in his heart certain that it did occur. When on his seventh birthday in 1829 he received Jerrer’s ‘Universal History’, he enthusiastically said to his father that Jerrer must have seen the momentous event himself, for how could he have depicted it so accurately?

Heinrich’s mind spurred with surety. It was in this moment, as his father amended him on the anachronism of the illustration, that Heinrich vowed to uncover Troy from the mist of time and legend; to show that the Iliad was at the least a real event to be forever regarded in the annals of history.

But maybe this was not quite the moment that Heinrich made his vow to uncover Troy. There was another moment, if not more an important one in kindling his passion.

16th century Iliad

One evening, whilst he was sweeping the floor of a grocer’s shop at the tender age of fourteen, he met a student from a local gymnasium. The student, a son of a clergyman named Hermann Niederhoffer, had been expelled from school for bad conduct and had descended into a life of bibulous destitution. But Niederhoffer had retained some antique and lyrical Greek of Homer. By providence, or serendipity, Heinrich then heard one hundred unadulterated (save for accent and pronunciation) lines of the Iliad from Niederhodder.

“Although I did not understand a syllable, the melodious sound of the words made a deep impression on me, and I wept bitter tears over my own unhappy, uneducated fate. Three times over did I get him to repeat to me those divine verses, rewarding his trouble with three glasses of whiskey, which I bought with the few pence that made up my whole fortune. From that moment on I never ceased to pray to God that by His Grace I might yet have the happiness of learning Greek.” Heinrich Schliemann.

I feel like I know Heinrich’s wonder and pain, the realisation that there is something you do not understand and yet want to so badly. I weep those ‘bitter tears’, figuratively that is, every time I hear the fluent words of a foreign tongue I dream to speak.

I adore this moment of exchange, dispensing his meagre earnings on whiskey just to hear those fleeting and archaic words. How far can we estimate the character of Heinrich from this tale of his? I like to think a lot. This was the dawn of Heinrich’s passion, these early moments sowed the seeds of a life that would blossom one day radiant and most full.

A Dutch brig, seascape by James Burrell

Like all great men he had to suffer, either by illness or disaster. He decided in his adolescence to try his luck and travel to the New World. He signed up as a cabin boy on a Brig, a square-rigged, two masted vessel. I wonder if he fancied himself an Argonaut setting off for the Golden Fleece. But no sooner than they had left port the vessel wrecked off the Netherlands (lured by sirens?), and after hours of exposure in the North Sea Heinrich reached land and trod sodden and miserable to Amsterdam.

Tuberculosis took him and he survived. He became a clerk and then learnt to read, write and speak English, devising his own linguistic method to learn a language. Within nine years he would master six tongues and almost thrice that by the time of his death.

In short succession I have given much detail, yet haven’t moved far. I don’t want to cover the whole book, you must read it! It suffices just to continue and write only that he quickly exerted himself, discovered the world of markets and traded in them. He grew, stepped out of poverty and found wealth. In Russia, St Petersburg, he met his first wife and fathered his first children. In the United States he contracted yellow fever. He witnessed and survived the great San Francisco fire of 1851, whilst profiting immensely from the Californian Gold Rush. His commercial empire ballooned, from olive oil, cotton, railroads, sugar cane, tobacco, to n’importe quoi really…

It is profoundly interesting to me that Heinrich’s passion to unearth Troy endured four decades. How had he not been dislodged from it? He must have had a peculiar alignment of quintessential characteristics. Dedication, perseverance, what other synonym? Just a damnable tenacity, all mélangé with a grandiose romanticism, must have made him a stalwart.

The book, written by a couple called the Pooles, glows in Heinrich’s romantic essence, and it is captivating. The verve of this book matches the élan and pace of its subjects. The authors colour the world of the 19th century around the Schliemanns so vividly, I could feel mood of the era and visualise its objects: steamers and rail, caiques, frocks and suits, Ottomans, mules, top hats, pantaloons and endless letters. Letters to politicians, letters to mandarins, letters to royalty, letters to intellectuals, letters to a love. There are so many wonderfully detailed anecdotes, so many strifes with the obstreperous and the avaricious, and navigations with the envious and admiring.

At forty seven, Heinrich set out for Athens to meet his unsuspecting wife to be, Sophia Kastronmenos. He had decided to remarry and interpolated in his scholarly letters to his friend and teacher, the Archbishop Theoclitus Vimbos, that he was looking for a new bride. But Heinrich, ever the romantic, insisted on his wife to be a woman of pure Greek heritage and resembling his hitherto fabled and beloved Helen of Troy.

Athens by Sir Herbert Pelham Edwin Hughes-Stanton (1870-1937)

On arriving in Athens he went to where Sophia was still schooling (I believe she was seventeen or eighteen, I forget). The chairman of the school led the clean-cut and debonair Heinrich, with cain and top hat, to her classroom. The chairman asked the teacher if they might hear a rendition of the guest’s favourite poet, Homer. Heinrich recognised Sophia but made no indication towards her. In reciting Homer some girls stammered and others droned a couple lines of the Iliad or the Odyssey. That was until Sophia stood up and fully recited, in Classical Greek, Helen’s lament for Hector at the end of the Illiad. Heinrich was moved to tears.

Soon after Heinrich met Vimbos for the first time since landing in Athens, then drove to the Kastromenos’s household to meet Sophia’s father, George, to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The parents were stunned, as expected, but eagerly accepted Heinrich’s proposal. Here was a man of renown and unfathomable wealth, how could they disagree such a prospect for their daughter, and of course themselves.

To the modern eye, this process of courtship may seem a throw-back to another era, a taboo. Even at that time it might have been felt so, but that was Heinrich’s way. In fact, many might see this move on Sophia as conspiratorially patriarchal and unjust, to be wedded as such without prior consultation. I would agree, but this matrimony became something great. And yet, this marriage was never forced on Sophia, in fact Heinrich fully designed this matchmaking on the proviso that Sophia could love him. In fact, he demurred when on an excursion out to Piraeus for the first time with his betrothed, he asked her why she had consented to the marriage, she answered truthfully that her parents had wanted her to consent. Heinrich was badly hit at this answer, he had wanted her to want him in the romantic fashion he had envisaged. Her answer spoiled and jeopardised the entire thing. He turned the travelling party homewards and seethed over her answer for several days. Heinrich simply reviled the idea that Sophia had consented to him as a slave to her parents’ will, he wanted it to be her will only. But Sophia reassured him that she was not against the marriage and that she could love him. A reconciliation occurred in elevated words and the marriage went ahead.

The truth that was to be was that Sophia and Heinrich were to become enamoured of each other and truly committed lovers. Their relationship deepened and blossomed as they subjected themselves to their archeological ordeals and adventures. And no sooner than they had been betrothed and married, they set off for Hissarlik, the yet to be declared burial site of Troy.

Watercolour by Thomas Hartley Cromek, 1834.

All I have writ is but the beginning of the book. Their adventures and discoveries go beyond Troy, indeed to the court of Agamemnon and to Crete. Their romantic partnership and shared discoveries raised them to the esteem of the great echelons of Europe. Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil paid them a visit at Mycenae and declared to Schliemann that the relief of the ancient Lion Gate shall ‘hereafter form your coat of arms’, they wept tears of pride. Even Sophia, in the epoch of men, gave a lecture about her discoveries to an auditorium of scholarly men, to great applause and acclaim. Heinrich would share his achievements justly so with his wife, who was ever as much involve in them as he was.

In relaying just a little of their tale, not even touching the main substance, I hope I have enticed you to discover their story. I wanted to write a broader article considering this book, but I have found myself engrossed mainly in the beginning and have not given much detail to their tales of discovery. But I think I have already shown enough and I can go on to reflect upon the character of these people.

My amazement after reading this book lay mainly in the way these people conducted themselves, what they valued and how they went about doing what they valued. There is a certain elevation and brilliance in the way they lived. Their ability to speak many tongues, to write beautiful prose in their most mundane of letters. I love the cordiality, deference and manners. Also the extravagance, the lengths that Heinrich went to organise a grand ball in Paris to introduce Sophia into society were astounding, with all the distinguished and haughty folk of high society. He put Sophia under an intensive course to learn French, English and German to a base sufficiency so as to be able to communicate at her own grand introduction. Hilariously, Heinrich only ever trusted one laundrette in the whole of Europe and it was in London, so wherever he was he had vast wardrobe which he would alternate as one half was sent back to be cleaned on the fastest steamer. The ostentation in which they moved and the subjects with whom they would speak beguiled me as I read. I wonder who are equivalent today.

But as surely as they were richly frocked, they would as quickly get stuck in the sweat, muck and grime of an archeological dig. They would run off to the ancient archipelago of Greece in exploration. They would dig alongside their employed labourers, and be there themselves when a great discovery was unearthed. This all added to their expanding legend and renown. A strident couple, unearthing the great mysteries, as opposed to all the armchair academics, whom Heinrich feuded with.

One value I found myself envious of was their work ethic. They barely allowed themselves a moment respite. On heading to Istanbul to seek protection from the Turkish authorities, Heinrich in a matter of weeks boasted to have learnt some five thousand words of Turkish just to be able to forthrightly make his case to the mandarins who sought to inhibit his dig. He eventually would overcome them as well as become fluent in Turkish. Sophia herself, whilst on the dig in Turkey, would find an increasing number of local peasants seeking her attention for medical assistance, and during the evenings into the nights would be cataloging their finds, in the thousands. She earned the respect and gain authority over the heavily patriarchal Turks, commanding them and inspecting them whilst they dug.

For me, when I read about such people, I cannot help but feel I am reading about another race of giants whose shoulders nobody today could stand on. Of course that is not true, but it feels like it. They are legendary characters, if not in moments almost mythical, worthy of Homer. And I suppose this brings me back to the Iliad, for I could not help thinking when I put this book down that the Schliemanns had irrevocably, by their actions and adventures, ennobled themselves like their Homeric heroes. They were probably the first people to lay their eyes on Homeric Troy in three thousand years. They are now inseparable from the immortal tale of Troy. They unearthed that which people for three thousand years have dreamt about. Heinrich and Sophia Schliemann are heroes.

Lion Gate, Heinrich Schliemann (upper right), and I think Sophia (lower right). 1884-5