SCHLIEMANN AND TROY.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Mr. C. M. Haines does a real service to scholarship in reminding the present generation of the amazing story of the life of Heinrich Sehliemann and of the "romance of scholar- ship" which attaches to his name—less familiar to-day than they deserve to be. It is not, I hope, ungrateful to point out two particulars in which Mr. Haines is not quite accurate. He is surely mistaken when he says that Schliemann's father "kept a small grocer's shop." Schliemann has himself left his own autobiography, and he says, "I was born in the little town of Neu Buckow, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, where my father, Ernest Schliemann, was Protestant clergyman, and whence in 1823 he was elected in that capacity to the parish of the village of Ankershagen . . . in the same duchy." The point is not unimportant, as it follows from this that young Schliemann began life in an atmosphere to some extent scholarly ; his father knew Latin, though not Greek, and took pains to teach Latin to his son. It is true that owing to financial losses which befell his father young Schlie- mann was sent as a grocer's assistant in Furstenburg when he was only fourteen. "I was engaged," he says, "from five in the morning till eleven at night, and had not a moment's leisure for study." It was here that the incident occurred: which Mr. Haines records, of the kindling of the boy's imagina- tion by hearing a passage recited from the Iliad ; but the
details are not quite accurately given. It was a drunken miller, not a commercial traveller, who gave the recitation which held young Schliemann spellbound. The story is worth giving as Schliemrum himself tells it :— "On the evening that he entered the shop he recited to us about a hundred lines of the poet, observing the rhythmic cadence of the verses. Although I did not understand a syllable, the melo- dious sound of the words made a deep impression upon me, mil I wept bitter tears over my unhappy fate. Three times over did I get him to repeat to me those divine verses, rewarding his trouble with three glasses of whisky, which I bought with the few pence that made up my whole fortune. From that moment I never ceased to pray God that by His grace I might yet have the happiness of learning Greek."
Those who are interested will find the passages I have quoted in Mos : the City and Country of the Trojans (John Murray,
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