Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/37

marks the site of an early Greek town. Mixed with it is another species of pottery, which seems of native manufacture, but cannot be of earlier date than the 9th century before our era. At the time when this pottery was in use, the Aeolic Ilion, like the four villages that had preceded it, was still confined to the old Pergamos. Those who have visited the sites of early Greek cities in Asia Minor will readily understand that this was almost necessarily the case. Like the Aeolians of Old Smyrna or Kymê, the Aeolian colonists at Hissarlik were few in number and scanty in resources, while their position among a hostile population, or within reach of sea-faring pirates, made them choose the most isolated and defensible summit in the neighbourhood where they had planted themselves. This summit, however, as always elsewhere, was near the sea. When the army of Xerxes passed through the Troad, the Aeolic city seems to have not yet extended into the plain below. The long-deserted lower town of the prehistoric Ilion was not again covered with buildings until the Macedonian age.

Dr. Schliemann has been vaguely accused of obscuring his facts by his theories, and the public has been warned that a strict distinction should be made between the theories he has put forward and the facts he has discovered. In reality, however, it is his critics themselves, rather than Dr. Schliemann, who have been guilty of propounding theories which have no facts to support them. As compared with most explorers, he has been singularly free from the fault of hasty generalization, or the far worse fault of bending the facts to suit pre-conceived views. Admiration of the Homeric Poems, and the growing conviction that if the Troy of Homer ever had any existence at all it could only have been at Hissarlik, can hardly be called theories. His works are for the most part a record of facts, brought into relation with one another by means of those inductive. inferences, which the scientific method of modern archaco-