I
n the Iliad,Homer describes the might and splendor of the Greek armies poised before the walls of
Tr o y.
Clan after clan poured out from the ships and huts onto the plain... innumerable as the leaves and blos-
soms in their season... the Athenians... the men of Argos and Tiryns of the Great Walls ...troops from
the great stronghold of Mycenae, from wealthy Corinth ...from Knossos... Phaistos... and the other
troops that had their homes in Crete of the Hundred Towns.^1
The Greeks had come from far and wide, from the mainland and the islands (MAP4-1), to seek re-
venge against Paris, the Trojan prince who had abducted Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Com-
posed around 750 BCE, the Iliadis the first great work of Greek literature. In fact, until about 1870, Homer’s
epic poem was generally regarded as pure fiction. Scholars discounted the bard as a historian, attributing
the profusion of names and places in his writings to the rich abundance of his imagination. The prehistory
of Greece remained shadowy and lost in an impenetrable world of myth.
TROY AND MYCENAEIn the late 1800s, however, a wealthy German businessman turned archae-
ologist proved that scholars had done less than justice to the truth of Homer’s account. Between 1870 and
his death 20 years later, Heinrich Schliemann (whose methods have sometimes been harshly criticized)
uncovered some of the very cities Homer named. In 1870, he began work at Hissarlik on the northwest-
ern coast of Turkey, which a British archaeologist, Frank Calvert, had postulated was the site of Homer’s
Troy. Schliemann dug into a vast mound and found a number of fortified cities built on the remains of
one another. One of them had been destroyed by fire in the 13th century BCE. This, scholars now gener-
ally agree, was the Troy of King Priam and his son Paris, the city Homer celebrated some 500 years later.
Schliemann continued his excavations at Mycenae on the Greek mainland, where, he believed, King
Agamemnon, Menelaus’s brother, had once ruled. Here his finds were even more startling. A massive
fortress-palace with a monumental gateway (FIGS. 4-1and 4-19); domed tombs beneath earthen mounds
(FIGS. 4-20and 4-21); quantities of gold jewelry, masks (FIG. 4-22), and cups; and inlaid bronze weapons
4