Volume 43, Number 20 · December 19, 1996
But Is It True?
By Richard Jenkyns
Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit
by David A. Traill
St. Martin's, 365 pp., $24.95
Lost and Found: The 9,000 Treasures of Troy: Heinrich Schliemann and the Gold That Got Away
by Caroline Moorehead
Viking, 307 pp., $24.95
The Gold of Troy: Searching for Homer's Fabled City Museum of Fine Arts/Abrams
by Vladimir Tolstikov, by Mikhail Treister
Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation/A.S. Pushkin State, 239 pp., $60.00
According to Heinrich Schliemann's keenest detractors, his life was not merely stranger than fiction; it was fiction. But the facts accepted even by those who most strongly suspect his honesty make an amazing story. Born in poverty in 1822, the son of a dissolute and lecherous Lutheran pastor in the eastern German town of Neubukow, he made himself immensely rich through the indigo trade in Russia, dealing in gold in California, and profiteering during the Crimean War. He was shipwrecked off the Dutch coast, and was lucky to escape with his life; he almost perished from starvation in Panama. He was a phenomenal traveler: he knew Jerusalem, Havana, Tokyo, Hong Kong, St. Petersburg, Petra, Odessa, Acapulco, and visited the principal capitals of Europe almost every year. As a linguist he was even more astonishing: he knew fifteen languages well, and others partially: his diaries were written in ten different languages (he commonly wrote in the language of the country he was in at the time); he used ancient Greek as a living tongue, and knew large quantities of the Koran and classical literature by heart, in the original.
Review, 5568 words
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