IN the year 1822 a lad was born in Germany who was to turn the spade-work of archeology into one of the romances of the century. His father had a passion for ancient history, and brought him up on Homer’s stories of the siege of Troy and Odysseus’ wanderings. “With great grief I heard from him that Troy had been so completely destroyed that it had disappeared without leaving any trace of its existence.”1 At the age of eight, having given the matter mature consideration, Heinrich Schliemann announced his intention to devote his life to the rediscovery of the lost city. At the age of ten he presented to his father a Latin essay on the Trojan War. In 1836 he left school with an education too advanced for his means, and became a grocer’s apprentice. In 1841 he shipped from Hamburg as cabin boy on a steamer bound for South America. Twelve days out the vessel foundered; the crew was tossed about in a small boat for nine hours, and was thrown by the tide upon the shores of Holland. Heinrich became a clerk, and earned a hundred and fifty dollars a year; he spent half of this on books, and lived on the other half and his dreams.2 His intelligence and application had their natural results; at twenty-five he was an independent merchant with interests on three continents; at thirty-six he felt that he had enough money, retired from commerce, and gave all his time to archeology. “In the midst of the bustle of business I had never forgotten Troy, or the agreement I had made with my father to excavate it.”3
In his travels as a merchant he had made it a practice to learn the language of each country he traded with, and to write in that language the current pages of his diary.4 By this method he learned English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, and Arabic. Now he went to Greece, studied the language as a living speech, and was soon able to read both ancient and modern Greek as fluently as German.* Henceforth, he declared, “I should find it impossible to live anywhere but on classical soil.”6 Since his Russian wife refused to leave Russia, he advertised for a Greek wife, laid down precise specifications for the position, and at the age of forty-seven chose a bride of nineteen from among the photographs he received. He married her almost at sight, and unwittingly in the ancient style of purchase; her parents charged him for her a price commensurate with their conception of his fortune. When his new wife bore him children he reluctantly consented to baptize them, but solemnized the ceremony by laying a copy of the Iliad upon their heads and reading a hundred hexameters aloud. He named them Andromache and Agamemnon, called his servants Telamon and Pelops, and christened his Athenian home Bellerophon.7 He was an old man mad about Homer.
In 1870 he went to the Troad—the northwest corner of Asia Minor—and made up his mind, against all current scholarly opinion, that Priam’s Troy lay buried under the hill called Hissarlik. After a year of negotiations he secured permission from the Turkish Government to explore the site; he engaged eighty laborers, and set to work. His wife, who loved him for his eccentricities, shared his toil in the earth from sunrise to sunset. All winter long an icy gale from the north drove a blinding dust into their eyes, and swept with such violence through the cracks of their frail cottage that no lamp could be kept lit in the evening. Despite the fire in the hearth the water froze nearly every night. “We had nothing to keep us warm except our enthusiasm for the great work of discovering Troy.”8
A year passed before they were rewarded. Then, blow by blow, a workman’s pick exposed a large copper vessel, and this, opened, revealed an astonishing treasure of some nine thousand objects in silver and gold. The canny Schliemann hid the find in his wife’s shawl, dismissed his workmen to an unexpected siesta, hurried to his hut, locked the door, spread out the precious things on-the table, linked each one fondly with some passage in Homer, adorned his wife with an ancient diadem, and sent messages to his friends in Europe that he had unearthed “the Treasury of Priam.”9 No one would believe him; some critics charged him with having placed the objects where he found them; and at the same time the Sublime Porte sued him for taking gold from Turkish soil. But scholars like Virchow, Dörpfeld, and Burnouf came to the site, verified Schliemann’s reports, and carried on the work with him until one buried Troy after another was uncovered, and the problem was no longer whether Troy had existed, but which of the nine Troys exhumed had been the Ilios of the Iliad.
In 1876 Schliemann resolved to confirm the epic from another direction—to show that Agamemnon too was real. Guided by Pausanias’ classic description of Greece,* he sank thirty-four shafts at Mycenae in the eastern Peloponnesus. Turkish officials interrupted the work by claiming half of the material that he had found at Troy. Unwilling to let the precious “Treasury of Priam” lie unseen in Turkey, Schliemann clandestinely dispatched the objects to the State Museum at Berlin, paid the Porte five times more damages than were required of him, and resumed his digging at Mycenae. Again he was rewarded; and when he saw his workers carrying up to him skeletons, pottery, jewelry, and golden masks, he telegraphed joyfully to the King of Greece that he had discovered the tombs of Atreus and Agamemnon.10 In 1884 he moved on to Tiryns and, guided again by Pausanias, unearthed the great palace and cyclopean walls that Homer had described.11
Seldom had any man done so much for archeology. He had the faults of his virtues, for his enthusiasm drove him into a reckless haste that destroyed or confused many exhumed objects in order to reach at once the goal that he sought; and the epics that had inspired his labors misled him into thinking that he had discovered Priam’s hoard at Troy, and the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae. The world of scholarship doubted his reports, and the museums of England, Russia, and France long refused to accept as genuine the relics that he had found. He consoled himself with vigorous self-appreciation, and went on digging courageously until disease struck him down. In his last days he hesitated whether to pray to the God of Christianity or to the Zeus of classic Greece. “To Agamemnon Schliemann, best beloved of sons, greeting!” he writes. “I am very glad that you are going to study Plutarch, and have finished Xenophon . . . I pray Zeus the Father and Pallas Athene that they will grant you a hundred returns of the day in health and happiness.”12 He died in 1890, worn out by climatic hardships, scholastic hostility, and the incessant fever of his dream.
Like Columbus he had discovered a world stranger than the one he sought. These jewels were older by many centuries than Priam and Hecuba; these graves were not the tombs of the Atridae, but the ruins of an Aegean civilization, on the Greek mainland, as ancient as the Minoan Age in Crete. Unknowingly Schliemann had proved Horace’s famous line—vixerunt fortes ante Agamemnona—“there lived many brave men before Agamemnon.”* Year by year, as Dörpfeld and Muller, Tsountas and Stamatakis, Waldstein and Wace dug more widely into the Peloponnesus, and still others explored Attica and the islands, Euboea and Boeotia, Phocis and Thessaly, the soil of Greece gave up the ghostly relics of a culture before history. Here too men had been lifted from barbarism to civilization by the passage from nomadic hunting to settled agriculture, by the replacement of stone tools with copper and bronze, by the conveniences of writing and the stimulus of trade; Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time.
On a long low hill five miles east of Argos and a mile north of the sea, stood, in the fourteenth century before our era, the fortress-palace of Tiryns. Today one reaches its ruins by a pleasant ride from Argos or Nauplia, and finds them half lost amid quiet fields of corn and wheat. Then, after a little climb up prehistoric stone steps, the traveler stands before the cyclopean walls built, said Greek tradition, for the Argive prince Proetus, two centuries before the Trojan War.† Even then the town itself was old, having been founded, said ancient memory, by the hero Tiryns, son of Argus of the hundred eyes, in the infancy of the world.14 Proteus, the story went on, gave the palace to Perseus, who ruled Tiryns with the dusky Andromeda as his queen.
The walls that protected the citadel rose from, twenty-five to fifty feet in height, and were so thick that at several places they contained spacious galleries, vaulted and arched with immense overlapping horizontal slabs. Many of the stones still in place measure six feet in length by three in breadth and depth; the smallest of them, said Pausanias, “could hardly be moved by a pair of mules.”15 Within the walls, behind a propylon or gateway that set a style for many an acropolis, lay a broad paved court bounded with colonnades; and around this, as at Cnossus, was a medley of rooms gathered about the megaron—a hall of state thirteen hundred square feet in area, with a pavement of painted cement, and a ceiling supported by four columns enclosing a hearth. Here, in contrast to merry Crete, was established a lasting principle of Greek architecture—the separation of the women’s quarters, or gynaeceum, from the chambers of the men. The king’s room and the queen’s room were built side by side, but, so far as the remains reveal, they were eremitically sealed against intercommunication. Of this palace-castle Schliemann found only the ground plan, the column bases, and portions of the wall. At the foot of the hill were the remnants of stone or brick houses and bridges, and some fragments of archaic pottery; there, in prehistoric days, the town of Tiryns huddled for protection below the palace walls. We must picture the life of Bronze Age Greece as moving insecurely around and within such feudal fortresses.
Ten miles farther north, perhaps in the fourteenth century before Christ, Perseus (if we wish to believe Pausanias16) built Mycenae—the greatest capital of prehistoric Greece. Here too, around a forbidding citadel, a town of several villages grew, housing a busy population of peasants, merchants, artisans, and slaves, who had the happiness of eluding history. Six hundred years later Homer called Mycenae “a well-built city, broad-avenued and abounding in gold.”17 Despite a hundred despoiling generations some parts of these also cyclopean walls survive, to attest the immemorial cheapness of labor and uneasiness of kings. In a corner of the wall is the famous Lion Gate, where, carved upon a stone triangle over a massive lintel, two royal beasts, now worn and headless, dumbly stand guard over a grandeur that is gone. On the acropolis beyond are the ruins of the palace. Again, as at Tiryns and Cnossus, we can trace the divisions of throne room, altar room, storerooms, bathroom, and reception rooms. Here once were painted floors, columned porticoes, frescoed walls, and majestic flights of stairs.
Near the Lion Gate, in a narrow area enclosed by a ring of erect stone slabs, Schliemann’s workers dug up nineteen skeletons, and relics so rich that one could forgive the great amateur for seeing in these shafts the burial chambers of the children of Atreus. Had not Pausanias described the royal graves as “in the ruins of Mycenae”?18 Here were male skulls with crowns of gold, and golden masks on the bones of the face; here were osseous ladies with golden diadems on what had been their heads; here were painted vases, bronze caldrons, a silver rhyton, beads of amber and amethyst, objects of alabaster, ivory, or faïence, heavily ornamented daggers and swords, a gaming board like that at Cnossus, and almost anything in gold—seals and rings, pins and studs, cups and beads, bracelets and breastplates, vessels of toilette, even clothing embroidered with thin plates of gold.19 These were assuredly royal jewels, royal bones.
In the hillside opposite the acropolis Schliemann and others discovered nine tombs altogether different from these “shaft graves.” Leaving the road that comes down from the citadel, one enters at the right a corridor lined with walls of large, well-cut stones. At the end is a plain portal, once adorned with slim cylindrical columns of green marble, now in the British Museum; above it is a simple lintel of two stones, one extending thirty feet and weighing 113 tons. Within, the traveler finds himself under a dome, or tholos, fifty feet high and as many wide; the walls are built of sawn blocks Reinforced with decorative bronze rosettes; each stratum of stones overlaps the one beneath, until the uppermost layer closes the top. This strange structure, Schliemann thought, was the tomb of Agamemnon, and a smaller tholos near by, discovered by his wife, was at once described as the tomb of Clytaemnestra. All the “beehive” tombs at Mycenae were found empty; thieves had anticipated the archeologists by several centuries.
These gloomy ruins are the reminders of a civilization as ancient to Pericles as Charlemagne to ourselves. Current opinion dates the shaft graves near to 1600 B.C. (some four hundred years before the traditional age of Agamemnon), and the beehive tombs about 1450; but prehistoric chronology is not a precision tool. We do not know how this civilization began, nor what people it was that built towns not only at Mycenae and Tiryns but at Sparta, Amyclae, Aegina, Eleusis, Chaeronea, Orchomenos, and Delphi. Probably, like most nations, it was already composite in stock and heritage; Greece was as diverse in blood before the Dorian invasion (1100 B.C.) as England before the Norman Conquest. So far as we can guess, the Mycenaeans were akin to the Phrygians and Carians of Asia Minor, and to the Minoans of Crete.20 The lions of Mycenae have a Mesopotamian countenance; this ancient motif probably came through Assyria and Phrygia to Greece.20a Greek tradition called the Mycenaeans “Pelasgi” (possibly meaning People of the Sea—pelagos), and pictured them as coming down from Thrace and Thessaly into Attica and the Peloponnesus in a past so distant that the Greeks termed them autochthonoi—aborigines. Herodotus accepted this account, and ascribed the Olympian gods to a Pelasgic origin, but he “could not say with any certainty what the language of the Pelasgi was.”21 No more can we.
Doubtless these autochthonoi were themselves late-comers into a land that had suffered cultivation since neolithic days; there are no aborigines. In their turn they too were overrun; for in the later years of Mycenaean history, towards 1600, we find many indications of a cultural-commercial, if not a military-political, conquest of the Peloponnesus by the products or emigrants of Crete.22 The palaces at Tiryns and Mycenae, except for the gynaeceum, were designed and decorated in the Minoan manner; Cretan vases and styles reached into Aegina, Chalcis, and Thebes; Mycenaean ladies and goddesses adopted the charming fashions of Crete, and the art revealed in the later shaft graves is unmistakably Minoan.23 Apparently it was this stimulating contact with a higher culture that lifted Mycenae to the peak of its civilization.
The remains of this culture are too fragmentary to give us a picture as distinct as those that take form in the ruins of Crete or the poetry of Homer. Life on the mainland was a little nearer to the hunting stage than in Crete. The bones of deer, wild boars, goats, sheep, hares, oxen, and pigs among the Mycenaean leavings—not to speak of fishbones and marine shells—indicate an appetite already Homeric, and unfriendly to the Cretan waist. Here and there the relics reveal the strange contemporaneity of “ancient” and “modern” modes—obsidian arrowheads lying beside a hollow bronze drill apparently used in boring dowel holes into stones.24
Industry was less advanced than in Crete; there are no signs on the mainland of such industrial centers as Gournia. Trade grew slowly, for the seas were troubled with pirates, including the Mycenaeans; the kings of Mycenae and Tiryns had Cretan artists engrave for them, on their vases and rings, a proud record of their achievements in piracy.25 To protect themselves against other pirates they built their cities inland, far enough from the sea to guard against sudden attack, close enough to take readily to their ships. Lying on the road from the Argolic Gulf to the Isthmus of Corinth, Tiryns and Mycenae were well situated both to plunder traders with feudal tolls, and to set out occasionally on buccaneering raids. Seeing Crete grow rich on orderly trade, Mycenae learned that piracy—like its civilized offspring, tariff dues—can strangle commerce and internationalize poverty; it reformed, and allowed piracy to subside into trade. By 1400 its mercantile fleet was strong enough to defy the sea power of Crete; it refused to ship its Africa-bound goods across the island, but sent them directly to Egypt; possibly this was the cause, or result, of a war that ended in the destruction of the Cretan citadels.
The wealth that grew from this trade was not accompanied by any commensurate culture visible in the remains. Greek tradition credited the Pelasgians with having learned the alphabet from Phoenician traders. At Tiryns and Thebes some jars have been found bearing unintelligible characters, but no clay tablets, or inscriptions, or documents have been discovered; probably when Mycenae decided to be literate it used perishable writing materials, as the Cretans did in their final period; and nothing has been preserved. In art the Mycenaeans followed Cretan models, and so faithfully that archeology suspects them of importing their major artists from Crete. But after Cretan art declined, painting flourished vigorously on the mainland. The decorative designs of borders and cornices are of the first order, and persist into classic Greece, while the surviving frescoes indicate a keen feeling for moving life. The Ladies in the Box are splendid dowagers, who might adorn any opera promenade today and be in full fashion of coiffure and gowns; they are more alive than the stiffly conscious Ladies in the Chariot, who are out for an afternoon drive in the park. Better still is the Boar Hunt, a fresco from Tiryns: the boar and the flowers are unconvincingly conventional, the incredibly pink hounds are disfigured with stylized spots of scarlet, black, or blue, and the hind quarters of the plunging boar taper away into the likeness of some high-heeled maiden falling from her palace bower; nevertheless the chase is real, the boar is desperate, the dogs are in fast flight through the air, and man, the most sentimental and terrible of all beasts of prey, stands ready with his murderous spear.26 One may suspect from such samples the active and physical life of the Mycenaeans, the proud beauty of their women, the vivid adornment of their palaces.
The highest art of Mycenae was in metals. Here the mainland equaled Crete, and dared to use its own forms and decoration. If Schliemann did not quite find the bones of Agamemnon, he found their weight in silver and gold: jewelry of many kinds, in spendthrift quantities; stud buttons worthy of any king; intaglios alive with scenes of hunting, war, or piracy; and a cow’s head in shining silver, with horns and frontal rosette of gold—at any moment one expects from it the plaintive mooing to which Schliemann, never at a loss for explanations, traced the name Mycenae (Mükenai).27 The finest of these metal relics from Tiryns and Mycenae are two bronze daggers inlaid with electron and burnished gold, and elegantly engraved with wildcats chasing ducks, and lions pursuing leopards or fighting men.29 Most peculiar of all the remains are the golden masks, apparently laid over the faces of dead royalty. One mask30 looks for all the world like the face of a cat; however, the gallant Schliemann ascribed it not to Clytaemnestra but to Agamemnon.
The unquestioned masterpieces of Mycenaean art were found neither at Tiryns nor at Mycenae but in a tomb at Vaphio, near Sparta, where a minor prince once emulated the magnificence of the northern kings. Here, amid another treasure of jewelry, were two thin cups of beaten gold, simply formed and yet worked with the loving patience of all great art. The craftsmanship is so like the best Minoan that most students are inclined to attribute these cups to some Cretan Cellini; but it would be a pity to deprive the Mycenaean culture of its most perfect memorials. The subject—the snaring and taming of a bull—seems characteristically Cretan; and yet the frequency with which such scenes are engraved upon Mycenaean rings and seals or painted upon the palace walls shows that the bull sport was as popular on the mainland as on the island. On one of the cups the bull is caught in a net of heavy rope; his mouth and nostrils gape with breathless anger and fatigue as he struggles to get free and imprisons himself the more; while on the other side a second bull gallops off in terror, and a third charges at a cowboy who catches it bravely by the horns. On the companion cup the captured bull is being led away; as we turn the vessel around we see him already reconciled to the restraints of civilization, and engaged, as Evans puts it, in “amorous conversation” with a cow.31 Many centuries were to pass before such skillful work would appear again in Greece.
The Mycenaean himself, as well as most of his art, is found in the tombs; for he folded and buried his dead in uncomfortable jars, and seldom cremated them as the Heroic Age would do. Apparently he believed in a future life, for many objects of use and value were placed in the graves. For the rest Mycenaean religion, so far as it reveals itself to us, gives every evidence of Cretan origin or kinship. Here as in Crete are the double ax, the sacred pillar, the holy dove, and the cult of a mother goddess associated with a young male deity, presumably her son; and here again are attendant divinities in the form of snakes. Through all the transformations of religion known to us in Greece the mother goddess has remained. After the Cretan Rhea came Demeter, the Mater Dolorosa of the Greeks; after Demeter the Virgin Mother of God. Today, standing on the ruins of Mycenae, one sees, in the little village below, a modest Christian church. Grandeur is gone; simplicity and consolation remain. Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.
After the fall of Cnossus Mycenae prospered as never before; the rising wealth of the “Shaft Grave Dynasty” raised great palaces upon the hills of Mycenae and Tiryns. Mycenaean art took on a character of its own, and captured the markets of the Aegean. Now the commerce of the mainland princes reached eastward into Cyprus and Syria, southward through the Cyclades to Egypt, westward through Italy to Spain, northward through Boeotia and Thessaly to the Danube; and found itself balked only at Troy. Like Rome absorbing and disseminating the civilization of Hellas, so Mycenae, won by the culture of dying Crete, spread the Mycenaean phase of that culture throughout the Mediterranean world.
Between the Greek mainland and Crete 220 islands dot the Aegean, forming a circle around Delos, and therefore called the Cyclades. Most of them are rugged and barren, precarious mountain survivals of a land half drowned in the sea; but some were rich enough in marble or metal to be already busy and civilized, as the world goes, long before Greek history comes into our view. In 1896 the British School of Athens dug into the soil of Melos at Phylakopi and found tools, weapons, and pottery remarkably akin, age by age, to the Minoan; and a like research in other islands has built up a prehistoric picture of the Cyclades conforming in time and character, though never comparable in artistic excellence, with the bioscope of Crete. The Cyclades were cramped for land, totaling less than a thousand square miles among them, and proved, like classic Greece, incapable of uniting under one political power. By the seventeenth century B.C. the little isles had passed in government and art, even, here and there, in language and writing, under Cretan domination. Then, in the final period (1400-1200), the imports from Crete fell away, and the islands increasingly took their pottery and their styles from Mycenae.
Moving eastward into the Sporades (Scattered) Islands, we find in Rhodes another prehistoric culture of the simpler Aegean type. In Cyprus the rich deposits of copper that gave the island its name brought it a measure of wealth throughout the Bronze Age (3400-1200), but its wares* remained crude and undistinguished before the coming of Cretan influence. Its population, predominantly Asiatic, used a syllabic script akin to the Minoan, and worshiped a goddess apparently descended from the Semitic Ishtar, and destined to become the Aphrodite of the Greeks,32 After 1600 the metal industry of the island developed rapidly; the mines, owned by the royal government, exported copper to Egypt, Crete, and Greece: the foundry at Enkomi made famous daggers, and the potters sold their globular bowls from Egypt to Troy. The forests were cut into timber, and cypress from Cyprus began to compete with the cedars of Lebanon. In the thirteenth century Mycenaean colonists founded the colonies that were to become the Greek cities of Paphos, sacred to Aphrodite, and Citium, birthplace of the Stoic Zeno, and Cyprian Salamis, where Solon paused in his wanderings to replace chaos with law.
From Cyprus Mycenaean trade and influence crossed to Syria and Caria, and thence, as well as by other “rowing-stones,” they moved up the coasts and islands of Asia until they reached Troy. There, on a hill separated by three miles from the sea, Schliemann and Dorpfeld found nine cities, superimposed each upon its predecessor, as if Troy had had nine lives.
(1) In the lowest strata were the remains of a neolithic village coming down to 3000 B.C. Here were walls of rough stones, mortared with mud; clay whorls, bits of worked ivory, tools of obsidian, and pieces of handpolished black pottery. (2) Above this lay the ruins of the Second City, which Schliemann believed to have been Homer’s Troy. Its enclosing walls, like those of Tiryns and Mycenae, were of cyclopean stones; at intervals there were fortresses, and at the corners great double gates, of which two are well preserved. Some houses survive to a height of four feet, their walls built of brick and wood upon a stone foundation. The red-painted pottery, wheel-turned but crude, indicates a life span for this city from approximately 2400 to 1900. Bronze has replaced stone for tools and weapons, and jewelry abounds; but the statuettes are unprepossessingly primitive. The Second City was apparently destroyed by fire; signs of conflagration are numerous, and persuaded Schliemann that this was the work of Agamemnon’s Greeks.
(3-5) Above the “Burnt City” are the relics of three successive hamlets, small and poor, and negligible in archeological content. (6) About 1600 another city rose on the historic hill. Through the passionate haste of his work, Schliemann mixed the objects of this stratum with those of the second, and dismissed the Sixth City as an unimportant “Lydian settlement.”33 But Dorpfeld, continuing the excavations after Schliemann’s death, and for a time with Schliemann’s money,34 revealed a town considerably larger than the Second, ornate with substantial buildings in dressed stone, and enclosed by a thirty-foot wall of whose four gates three remain. In the ruins were monochrome vases of finer workmanship than before, vessels like the “Minyan” ware of Orchomenos, and potsherds so like those found at Mycenae that Dorpfeld considered them to be importations from that city, and therefore contemporary with the Shaft Grave Dynasty (1400-1200). On these and other shifting grounds current opinion identifies the Sixth City with Homer’s Troy,*35 and assigns to it the “Treasury of Priam” that Schliemann thought he had found in the Second City—six bracelets, two goblets, two diadems, a fillet, sixty earrings, and 8700 other pieces, all in gold.36 The Sixth City too, we are assured, perished by fire, shortly after 1200. Greek historians traditionally assigned the siege of Troy to 1194-1184 B.C.†
Who were the Trojans? An Egyptian papyrus mentions certain “Dardenui” as among the allies of the Hittites at the battle of Kadesh (1287); it is likely that these were the ancestors of the “Dardenoi” who in Homer’s terminology are one with the Trojans.37 Probably these Dardani were of Balkan origin, crossed the Hellespont in the sixteenth century with the kindred Phrygians, and settled in the lower valley of the Scamander.38 Herodotus, however, identified the Trojans with the Teucrians, and the Teucrians, according to Strabo, were Cretans who settled in the Troad,‡ perhaps after the fall of Cnossus.40 Both Crete and the Troad had a sacred Mt. Ida, the “many-fountained Ida” of Homer and Tennyson. Presumably the region was subject at various times to political and ethnic influences from the Hittite hinterland. All in all, the excavations indicate a civilization partly Minoan, partly Mycenaean, partly Asiatic, partly Danubian. Homer represents the Trojans as speaking the same language and worshiping the same gods as the Greeks; but later Hellenic imagination preferred to think of Troy as an Asiatic city, and of the famous siege as the first known episode in an endless contest between Semite and Aryan, East and West.41
More significant than the racial complexion of its people was the strategic position of Troy near the entrance to the Hellespont and the rich lands about the Black Sea. Throughout history that narrow passage has been the battleground of empires; the siege of Troy was the Gallipoli adventure of 1194 B.C. The plain was moderately fertile, and precious metals lay in the soil to the east; but this alone would hardly account for the wealth of Troy, and the tenacious attack of the Greeks. The city was admirably placed to levy tolls upon vessels wishing to pass through the Hellespont, while it was too far inland to be conveniently assailed from the sea:42 perhaps it was this, and not Helen’s face, that launched a thousand ships upon Ilium. On a likelier theory the southward current and winds in the strait persuaded merchants to unload their cargoes at Troy and ship them overland into the interior; from the charges exacted for this service Troy may have derived its wealth and power.43 In any case the city’s trade grew rapidly, as may be judged from the varied provenance of its remains. From the lower Aegean came copper, olive oil, wine, and pottery; from the Danube and Thrace came pottery, amber, horses, and swords; from distant China came so great a rarity as jade.44 In return Troy brought from the interior, and exported, timber, silver, gold, and wild asses. Seated proudly behind their walls, the “horse-taming Trojans” dominated the Troad, and taxed its trade on land and sea.
The picture that we derive from the Iliad of Priam and his household is one of Biblical grandeur and patriarchal benevolence. The King is polygamous, not as a diversion but as a royal responsibility to continue his high breed abundantly; his sons are monogamous, and as well behaved as the fictitious Victorians—excepting, of course, the gay Paris, who is as innocent of morals as Alcibiades. Hector, Helenus, and Troilus are more likable than the vacillating Agamemnon, the treacherous Odysseus, and the petulant Achilles; Andromache and Polyxena are as charming as Helen and Iphigenia; and Hecuba is a shade better than Clytaemnestra. All in all, the Trojans, as pictured by their enemies, seem to us less deceitful, more devoted, better gentlemen, than the Greeks who conquered them. The conquerors themselves felt this in later days; Homer had many a kind word to say for the Trojans, and Sappho and Euripides left no doubt as to where their sympathies and admiration lay. It was a pity that these noble Dardans stood in the way of an expanding Greece which, despite its multitude of faults, would in the end bring to this and every other region of the Mediterranean a higher civilization than they had ever known.