Fantastic Metropolis

Norton was different from the majority of forty-niners. He did not come with the typical empty pockets to mine California’s newly discovered gold. Instead he is reported to have entered the port with $40,000. With this working capital he set himself up in the real estate and import brokerage business and before long had parlayed this sizable amount into a respectable fortune. By applying shrewd business practices to a variety of ventures, Norton is said to have accumulated about a quarter of a million dollars by 1853.

—Patricia E. Carr, American Heritage Magazine

After a childhood in Mecklenburg Schliemann became a wealthy businessman in St. Petersburg and the United States. He was often involved in unscrupulous dealings—for instance, he cornered the saltpetre market for gunpowder in the Crimean War, bought gold off prospectors in the California gold-rush, and dealt in cotton during the American Civil War–at least, that was his story. In the late 1850’s he seems to have wanted to break away from his business career into more intellectual pursuits in order to gain respectability.

—Michael Wood, In Search Of The Trojan War

I know, I know: what on earth could a madman who declared himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico (although he later removed his protection from Mexico on the grounds that it was ungovernable) have to do with the ‘discoverer’ of Troy? Well, possibly quite a bit, even if you ignore the two men’s outsize megalomania. Norton probably had a touch more of that than Schliemann, but on the other hand who’s to say that the man who declared I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon when he was in fact looking at people who had been dead for 400 years before that great king didn’t have even more monomania than Norton, a drive that balanced his personality like the prow of a ship breaking the waves?

Of course, to discuss Schliemann at all, we must discuss his greatest accomplishment: the excavation of the mound of Hisarlik and the discovery of what he called ‘The Treasures of Priam,’ especially that most famous of all jewelry, the ‘Jewels of Helen,’ which caused a stir when discovered unlike anything that had ever happened before (in one masterstroke Schliemann had proved, as far as the world was concerned, that the works of Homer were much more than simple tales but rather might actually be historically valid) and which achieved worldwide fame when Schliemann smuggled them out of Troy rather than hand them over to the Turkish government. Schliemann’s promise broken, the Treasures of Priam (or whoever they belonged to originally) ended up in Berlin, and were from there taken by the Russians following the collapse of Nazi Germany. Interesting to note that after Troy, Schliemann would go on to excavate at Mycenae, Orchomenos and Tiryns, in each case seeking the Homeric heroes of the Trojan War, always searching to prove that the battle reported by the blind poet had actually occurred, that there was history as well as lyricism in the Iliad. He was hardly the first to think so, of course.

Agamemnon, it seems to me, must have been the most powerful of the rulers of his day; and it was for this reason that he raised the force against Troy, not because the suitors of Helen were bound to follow him by the oaths sworn to Tyndareus. Pelops, according to the most reliable tradition in the Peloponnese, came there from Asia. He brought great wealth with him, and, settling in a poor country, acquired such power that, though he was a foreigner, the whole land was called after him. His descendants became still more prosperous… So the descendants of Pelops became more powerful than the descendants of Perseus. It was to this empire that Agamemnon succeeded, and at the same time he had a stronger navy than any other ruler; thus, in my opinion, fear played a greater part than loyalty in the raising of the expedition against Troy.

—Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War