Treasure Seekers: Glories of the Ancient Aegean Page #2

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And he took a journey to the

Mediterranean, to Italy and to Greece.

It was during the course of

that journey,

he was looking for something to do with

the rest of his life and he found it.

In June of 1868, Schliemann

arrived at the ruins of Pompeii.

Buried under layers of volcanic ash

for almost 1800 years,

this lost city was in the midst of

a spectacular rediscovery.

Excavations had uncovered

magnificent public spaces.

And rescued intimate frescos

from the buried houses.

Schliemann was captivated

by this journey into a lost world.

For the first time he met a real

archeologist, Giuseppe Fiorelli.

It was the Italian's innovation to

inject plaster into the ancient ash,

revealing the forms of the Pompeiians

caught in the last moments of life.

At this point, archeology was more

romance than science,

with few precedents

and even fewer rules.

Needless to say,

it was right up Schliemann's alley.

As he continued his travels,

His diaries began to

reflect a new direction.

He would set off on

a grand archeological adventure

and uncover the biggest

challenge of all:

the legendary city of Troy.

But first he had to find it.

When Heinrich Schliemann set out

on his quest for Troy,

most people believed the city

was a myth.

For one thing, it wasn't on the map.

Legend had placed Troy on the Dardanelles,

near the coast of present-day Turkey

But no ruins identified

the great city.

It was as if the site

of the Trojan War-

the greatest war story ever told-

had never existed.

But for thousands of years people

had repeated Homer's tale.

How Helen, the face that launched

a thousand ships,

had been taken away to Troy.

How the Greeks had battled for

ten long years to get her back,

led by the great king Agamemnon.

How the war was finally won with

a wooden horse full of soldiers.

In Homer's tale,

the Greeks destroyed the great city

of Troy; burning it to the ground.

Schliemann was just captured

by the Iliad,

the descriptions of what goes on,

everything about the human condition

is found in the Iliad

in a very poetic

and magnificent manner.

And the idea of finding the site

where all of these great tensions

between love and strife,

between divine and human interaction

were worked out

was something that just

swallowed him up.

With his copy of Homer as a guide,

Schliemann examined the mound thought

to be the likeliest location of Troy.

In the Iliad, two springs marked

the foot of the great city's hill.

To his dismay, Schliemann found

many more here.

And trial excavations turned up

nothing but dirt.

But just as he was about to leave

the area, the German got lucky-

He met an Englishman named

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