Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/52

represented Ilium as a great,^[1] elegant,^[2] flourishing, and well-inhabited,^[3] well-built^[4] city, with large streets,^[5] if it had been in reality only a very little town; so small indeed, that, even supposing its houses, which appear to have been built like the present Trojan village-houses, and, like them, but one story high, to have been six stories high, it could hardly have contained 3000 inhabitants. Nay, had Troy been merely a small fortified borough, such as the ruins of the third city denote, a few hundred men might have easily taken it in a few days, and the whole Trojan war, with its ten years' siege, would either have been a total fiction, or it would have had but a slender foundation. I could accept neither hypothesis, for I found it impossible to think that, whilst there were so many large cities on the coast of Asia, the catastrophe of a little borough could at once have been taken up by the bards; that the legend of the event could have survived for centuries, and have come down to Homer to be magnified by him. to gigantic proportions, and to become the subject of his divine poems.

Besides, the tradition of all antiquity regarding the war of Troy was quite unanimous, and this unanimity was too characteristic not to rest on a basis of positive facts, which so high an authority as Thucydides^[6] accepts as real history. Tradition was even unanimous in stating that the capture of Troy had taken place eighty years before the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus. Furthermore, as mentioned in my Ilios,^[7] the Egyptian documents give us historic evidence that Ilium and the kingdom of Troy had a real existence; for in the poem of Pentaur,