Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/15

Egyptologists, then more recently the decipherers of the monuments of Assyria and Babylonia, have been forced to yield to the stubborn evidence of facts. It is now the turn of the students of Greek and Asianic archaeology to do so too. For here, also, the hand of the explorer and excavator has been at work, and the history of the remote past has been literally dug out of the earth in which it has so long lain buried.

The problem, from which the scholars of Europe had turned away in despair, has been solved by the skill, the energy, and the perseverance, of Dr. Schliemann. At Troy, at Mykénae, and at Orkhomenos, he has recovered a past which had already become but a shadowy memory in the age of Peisistratos. We can measure the civilization and knowledge of the peoples who inhabited those old cities, can handle the implements they used and the weapons they carried, can map out the chambers of the houses where they lived, can admire the pious care with which they tended their dead, can even trace the limits of their intercourse with other nations, and the successive stages of culture through which they passed. The heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey have become to us men of flesh and blood; we can watch both them, and older heroes still, in almost every act of their daily life, and even determine their nature and the capacity of their skulls. It is little wonder if so marvellous a recovery of a past in which we had ceased to believe, should have awakened many controversies, and wrought a silent revolution in our conceptions of Greek history. It is little wonder if at first the discoverer who had so rudely shocked the settled prejudices of the historian should have met with a storm of indignant opposition or covert attack. But in this case what was new was also what was true, and, as fact after fact has accumulated and excavation after excavation been systematically carried out, the storm has slowly died away, to be followed by warm acknowledgment and unreserved acquiescence. To-