reading. An interesting sketch of his early life, by Bayard Taylor, printed in the New York Tribune, shows that his enthusiasm in classical study was of such an exaltation that one might in advance predict that he would find whatever he wanted to find, and see what he went out to see, but that his scientific faculties would hardly keep pace with his fancy. "In 1869, with the Iliad and Odyssey in his pocket," he went into the Levant, first to Ithaca, where he soon satisfied himself of the identity of the site of Ulysses' palace, the grotto of the Nymphs, and the home of the swineherd, "with ten of the twelve stalls for swine." The people in Ithaca, it seems, were deeply impressed with his Homeric devotion, and often gathered together to hear him read the verses of his great original; and on one occasion (to quote Mr. Taylor's translation of the passage), " in order to be heard by all, he had a table placed, as a rostrum, under a plane-tree in the centre of the village, and then read, with a loud voice, the twentythird book of the Odyssey, from the opening to the 247th verse, wherein it is related how the Queen of Ithaca, the best and most chaste of women, recognizes her beloved spouse after twenty years of separation. Although I had already read the passage numberless times, I was always freshly moved whenever I perused it, and the magnificent lines made the same impression on my auditors. All wept profusely, and I was obliged to weep with them." To those who know the modern Greek, and the quickwittedness of the people, the image of this grave foreigner who acquired the language in middle age, gathering the Ithacans about him to read to them a poem in a language of which very few of them would comprehend a sentence, even in a familiar pronunciation, must suggest other attractions than the pathos of the poem, and possibly other cause for tears than sympathy with Penelope! The schoolmaster is not a stranger in Greece, but the Iliad is an immense distance still from peasant Greek, and the selfsatisfaction at his bardic prowess kindles a lively appreciation of his naïveté and kindly nature of his ultra-German unsuspectingness and poetic sympathies-but hardly inspires any confidence in his scientific acumen or exactitude in future researches.

One is easily induced to believe in the authenticity of traditions when travelling in Greece, for the double reason that the people are as yet only partially cursed by letters, and therefore keep all things by tradition; and because, without our knowing it, the traditions have perhaps been made partly by the existing remains. Rambling over the island of Cerigo one day, I came across some abandoned excavations, some fragments of columns, and a fine Hellenic wall-evidently part of a temple of the good days of Greek art. Close by, a shepherd boy listlessly watched half-adozen sheep, and, more by way of opening conversation than because I expected information, I asked him what this had been. palace," he said. "But what king? I asked. Menelas, of course-don't you know?" he replied, with a wonder, as if everybody ought to know as much as that. supposed tradition had been a revival, not survival-the peasant had

"Oh, the king's "Menelas-King

look of simple

Now here the

borrowed, through many removes, from mythology. The so-called temple of "Menelas" was a comparatively modern temple, and the shepherd boy did much as Schliemann has just been doing-he named the oldest thing he knew to suit the favourite theory.

But the peasant of classic lands generally has a peculiar instinct for comparative archæology, an especial reverence for very old buildings; and when we come to consider that it only requires the transmission from father to son, or grandson, fifty times, of such simple facts as "here the ancient city stood," or "here the great battle between Agamemnon and Priam was fought," which is the extent of popular tradition in such matters, to take us back twenty-five hundred years, it is not so absurd as people generally think to find history in popular tradition. What is really singular, and yet, in my own experience, positively the case, is, that deeds which are equally flattering to national pride, and equally local in the interest, but which occurred within the range of written history, are entirely lost from popular tradition, while historico-mythical events are retained. An instance of this occurred to me in Crete, where the traditional tendency is at the maximum. I was searching for the site of Minoa, a city founded by Minos, of which Strabo says that it was only a ruin in his time, and which Spratt has placed on the shore of Suda Bay, and marked by a little circular port, over which, on the hill-side, is a remnant of military walls and a round tower. On visiting these ruins, I saw at once that they were of much later date than Spratt had supposed. A city founded by Minos means simply, of course, a city of the early Pelasgic date of Cretan civilization, and these have always Cyclopean walls (in Crete always of the second period and neo-lithic), while the ruins cited by Spratt were clearly Hellenic, the stone in polygonal forms, but finely cut and jointed to perfection, with the marks of the cutting tools still showing on the surface. A careful search through the vicinity gave me nothing older, and I abandoned the quest for the time; but on a subsequent visit to that part of the island, I asked a shepherd if he could tell me of any remains of a very old city, and he told me that, on a hill he mentioned, situated on a little harbour outside of Suda, a beautiful, nearly land-locked port, admirable for ancient usages, I would find it. He knew nothing about this later work-did not even know it existed. I found, on the spot to which he directed me, the site of a city, with the foundations of small houses cut in the rock, and remains of two or three tombs. The reverence for the παλαιδ-κάστρον was the only part of the antique character which remained to him. And I venture to say that, of the uneducated people of Greece, ten will know about the Trojan war, and the heroes of it, where one will know anything of Marathon or Salamis, and the chiefs who won them. If this be the case even now, how much more in old time, when the bard was master of all men's souls, and the definiteness of verse embalmed the faith once versified, while history unversified was forgotten?

But to return to Schliemann and his quest. It was to be expected

VOL. XXIX.-No. 174.

82.

that he would find Troy, or at least that he would satisfy himself that he had found it; he did the latter, at all events. It was Homer's Troy he wanted, and Homer was his guide-book. If Homer had been history, ipsissima verba, he would have found nothing, for Homer would have guided excavators long ago-he has as it is-and if Schliemann had followed Homer, he would never have found what he believes to be Troy.

As to history, there does not seem much reason to dispute the existence of a city which was the object of a long and violent struggle between the Greeks and the Asiatics, and that that city was called Ilion by the Greeks. Lenormant and other Egyptologists believe that they recognize in Iluna and Dardani of the Egyptian inscriptions, Ilion and the Dardanians; and the general unanimity of Greek tradition makes the occurrence of this war hardly a matter to be regarded as mythical. The details, even if of importance, are necessarily a matter as to which Homer (whether he be the bard himself or whether that bard be another myth, and the name only a nom de chant for an editing committee of some pre-historic Homer Publishing Society, I care not now to opine) must have necessarily been almost as much in the dark as we; but that the Iliad, as we have it, is a complete, consecutive, and carefully reduced narrative, written with a thorough knowledge of the locality now known as the Troad, and conformed in all its movements and strategy to the supposed battle-field, has, I think, been conclusively proven by Mr. Nicolaïdes, a Cretan author resident in Athens.*

As to the mythic personalities with which the story is constructed, of course we have critically nothing to do, any more than with the descriptions and manners as given by the poem. These are, of course, conformable to the epoch in which the poem was written. Homer describes the weapons and arts of Homer's own day, just as a Cretan story-teller told me one day how Yanni of one of the villages we passed in our excursion had fallen in love with a Nereïd in a cave he pointed out to me; and then he went on to repeat to me the swan maiden's story, with some classical modifications, and in terms of to-day, even to the fiddle Yanni played. It is as absurd to take Homer's descriptions of the shield of Achilles as an illustration of the state of the art at any definite period of Greek history as to take Rembrandt's picture of the Gethsemane scene as a proof that Roman soldiers used blunderbusses. As to the Trojan war, we know absolutely nothing which could fix its date. The epoch at which Greek tradition would fix it can only be the latest date possible; too many events are crowded into that century or two about the 14th B.c. to permit us to regard this as anything more than a mythical expression of time.

What proves, even more than the mythical details of the Iliad, that it took place in the mythical period is, that Homer made it hang on the rape of Helen; and as this myth is recorded in various ways by the mytho

* Topographie et plan stratégique de l'Iliade (Paris, 1867, Hachette): & work which shows not only the mastery of the text which might be expected of a Hellene, but a minute knowledge of the localities.

logists-one version making Theseus the ravisher, and the whole story, according to Professor Max Müller, a repetition of an older Indian mythit is clear that the event was so remote from historical recollection that it had, in fact, lost all definite personality as much as the labours of Hercules or the voyage of Jason.

But because mythical, thence not necessarily fictitious or without a general accordance with the real events; and that it is not out of the province of criticism and archæological research combined to prove some day that Troy did exist and where, is my firm belief. Of the importance of the conclusions, if attainable, the start which Schliemann's supposed discovery gave the archæological world sufficiently shows. Of course, all investigation must begin with the Iliad as the nearest to history; for whether all separate Hellenic traditions shaped themselves to suit the Iliad, or were originally in independent accord with it, we cannot, of course, determine; and the result is the same-we have only "Homer" as authority, and the chief practical question is, to see if the Iliad gives any clear local indications of the site which was in early times recognized as that of Troy; and whether the siege was the actual occurrence, the facts of which were preserved by him, or only a myth by him localized, is at present unimportant; what we want first to know is, if he shows any proof of having attempted to localize it, and where. The examination will show that he had definite notions as to this, and that he fixed on the heights at Bounarbashi as the precise site.

The Iliad supposes the fleet to have been drawn up on the shore of the Hellespont, as we see by several allusions throughout the poem; but, to be more precise, we are told that the ships, being in a level space between two promontories, were necessarily placed in several lines, "and filled entirely the great borders of the gulf included between the two promontories" (Book xiv.). This expresses accurately the nature of the alluvial plain at the mouth of the Mendere, which has been the agent in the construction of the land which is slowly being built out into the Hellespont. Strabo notes that, from the Trojan war to his time, the plain had been extended six stadia beyond the place occupied by the Greeks; Herodotus compares the Trojan plain to the delta of Egypt; facts which, while they have no absolute value, show that the shore of the Hellespont at the mouth of the Mendere, and between Capes Sigæum and Rhætium, was recognized as the site indicated for the Greek camp by the Iliad. According to Nicolaïdes, the recession of the Hellespont since the date assigned to the Trojan war is about 3,000 metres, and the length of the plain from the site marked out for the Greek camp to that occupied by Troy would be, on the Bounarbashi hypothesis, between six and seven miles, which accords well with the movements.

The manœuvres of the troops in the attack on the Greek camp and fleet show that the assault was made facing the north, with the river, the Scamander, on the left; Hector, on the left of the army, being on the river, and in reply to Polydamas, who calls his attention to the augury, he

says that it does not matter to him if birds fly to his right, towards the East and the dawn, or to his left, towards the West and the shadows. The shore of the Hellespont, then, at the east of the river, may be taken as a certain point of departure according to the topography of the Iliad.

If, then, we find that the other local indications correspond with the natural features of the plain, we have a recognition of general location of the highest value.

Of course the Scamander forms in the demonstration, as in the poem, a feature of the first importance; and it is no slight proof of Homer's distinct localization to find the same general character as that which the Iliad attributes to it, and that the river of to-day corresponds to the many gracious epithets Homer lavished on the Xanthus, as if he himself had been nurtured near a mountain torrent, and found on the Trojan plain something glad whose sound and sight restored his boyhood to him (for Homer, if Homer, was not blind when he went to Troy), and which we might know thence to be Scamander, grown hardly older, though certainly less majestic, since Turkish unthrift has cleared away so much of the forests which once clothed Ida and the lesser hills along its course.

Nothing could better characterise the Mendere, the Scamander of to-day, than the epithets Homer gives it-" deep eddying," * deep flowing," "silver eddied," with precipitous bank-torrential-cutting away the bank-carrying away the trees and stones; for in time of flood it is a wild torrent, and in summer a tranquil, bright, and gently eddying streamlet. We cannot question that this is the Scamander, and whether (to leave archæology for a moment) it was here that Hector, still reeling from the blow of the mighty Ajax, was laid on the silvery shore, that the cool waters might reawaken his dizzy sense; here that Priam crossed on his last despairing quest; whether here a foot of Agamemnon's host ever passed or not, we may be certain that by this way the poet passed who gave us the Iliad: whether he was born in Cos or Chios we shall never know, but we may know that this sacred plain he knew (waiving, if I am permitted, for the moment the committee notion), that here the Iliad (committee or no) was born. He has described it too faithfully to leave any doubt on this, and on that rocky height where the goats have browsed for unbroken ages he saw what he believed to be the city of Priam. There are still the smoking fountains where the Trojan women washed, as do the women of Bounarbashi to-day, their linen on the pleasant days when no foe was near, almost as he described them, and looking back he might have seen Samothrace, from whose summit he knew that Neptune looked on while the war was raging.

It is true that as history the Iliad almost disappears from sight when we have eliminated the greater Gods and their progeny; but the Scamander and the great plain, with the fishy Hellespont, the Pergamus, and even the solid Pelasgic wall remain, and all the best of the Iliad with them. One may almost mark the ford where the gallant Asteropaios turned to defy the invincible son of Thetis, and the steep bank where the lance of