Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/51

By my excavations on the hill of Hissarlik in 1879, in company with Professor Rudolf Virchow of Berlin and M. Emile Burnouf of Paris, I supposed that I had settled the Trojan question for ever. I thought I had proved that the small town, the third in succession from the virgin soil, whose house-substructions I had brought to light at an average depth of from 7 to 8 mètres beneath the ruins of four later cities, which in the course of ages had succeeded each other above them on the same site, must necessarily be the Ilium of the legend immortalized by Homer; and I maintained this theory in my work Ilios, which I published at the end of 1880. But after its publication I became sceptical, not indeed regarding the position of Troy, for there could be no question but that Hissarlik marked its site, but respecting the extent of the city; and my doubts increased as time wore on. I soon found it no longer possible to believe that the divine poet—who, with the fidelity of an eye-witness and with so much truth to nature, has drawn the picture, not only of the plain of Troy with its promontories, its rivers, and its heroic tombs, but of the whole Troad, with its numerous different nations and cities, with the Hellespont, Cape Lectum, Ida, Samothrace, Imbros, Lesbos, and Tenedos, as well as all the mighty phenomena of nature displayed in the country—that this same poet could have