Almost two hundred years ago, in Germany, a boy scratched his initials on a linden tree.

He was small for his age, with brown eyes and a head that looked too big for the rest of him. He was fifth in a family of nine children, and the oldest living son. Two and a half months after he was born, his older brother died and he was given the dead boy�s name: Heinrich. The first initial, H, was two slashes and a crosspiece. He gripped the penknife tightly, trying to make the lines straight.

The next initial, S, was tricky. He knew that from experience: he had carved his initials dozens of times before, and the curves of the S were hard to control. Nevertheless, he wanted to make his mark. He started on the S of his last name.

Heinrich�s first journey took him to the German port of Hamburg. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for traveling. Heinrich wrote: �The view of Hamburg . . . carried me off to seventh heaven. . . . I turned into a dreamer.� His dream, at this point in his life, was to regain his health and to rise in the world.

Unfortunately, he couldn�t find work. No one wanted an employee who coughed up blood. At last Heinrich grew so poor that he wrote to ask his uncle for help. His uncle sent money with a letter that shamed Heinrich so deeply that he promised himself: �I would never again ask a relative for aid; rather would I starve to death than beg such a man for the loan of a bread crumb.�

He kept that promise. He also kept the money. Shortly afterward, he heard there was a ship sailing to South America, and the prospect of a job in La Guaira, Venezuela. The ship�s agent accepted Heinrich�s application gratefully. It was not easy to find young men who were willing to travel two thousand miles to a land that was best known as a breeding ground for yellow fever.

On November 27, 1841, the ship Dorothea �flew like a seabird over the dark foamy waves.� Heinrich was bound for South America.

But he never got there. The weather was stormy, with high winds and temperatures below zero. Around midnight on December 10, Heinrich was awakened by the captain�s shouts. Waves dashed against the boat with such force that the portholes were shattered, and water gushed in. �I barely saved my life running almost naked on deck,� wrote Schliemann. He lashed himself to the ship�s railing so that he wouldn�t be swept overboard. Snowflakes fell from the sky. He said a silent farewell to his family, prayed to God, and �gave my body over to the sharks.� The ship began to sink.

Then, suddenly, Heinrich�s fear was swept away. He untied himself and began to climb the rigging, determined to postpone death as long as possible. As he was climbing, the broken ship rocked and pitched, sinking deep below the waves. Heinrich grabbed hold of a floating barrel. He lost consciousness. Some hours later, he awoke and found himself on a sandbank off the Dutch coast. His body was covered with bruises and deep gashes, and two of his teeth had been knocked out � but he was alive.

Fearsome though the shipwreck was, it left Heinrich feeling optimistic. Only three men survived the wreck of the Dorothea. �God must have chosen me for great things,� he wrote. �I felt reborn.� And it is a curious fact that after his shipwreck, Heinrich was seldom troubled by ill health. He took up sea bathing. He stopped coughing up blood. Though he was a small man all his life, he was tough and hardy � and his energy was boundless.

When Heinrich returned to Russia, he began to think seriously about marriage. He proposed to several women, all of whom rejected him. At last his choice fell on Ekaterina Petrovna Lyshina, the daughter of a business acquaintance. Heinrich had proposed to Ekaterina before his trip to America, but she had refused him. Heinrich was not attractive to women, with his small frame and round head. During his journey, he had grown no better-looking; he had, however, become very rich. Ekaterina accepted the millionaire�s proposal, and they were married.

It was a bitterly unhappy marriage. Heinrich married for love. Ekaterina married for money. Neither of them got what they wanted. Heinrich nagged and scolded his wife over every penny she spent. Ekaterina grew to hate the sight of her husband. In spite of their misery, they had three children: a son named Sergei, born in 1855, and two daughters, Natalia and Nadezhda, born in 1858 and 1861.

During the next eleven years, Heinrich made more and more money. He continued to invest in groceries and luxuries. He bought large supplies of saltpeter, brimstone, and lead to sell to the Russian military during the Crimean War. �All through the war,� Heinrich admitted, �I thought of nothing but money.� His greatest solace was study. When he was not increasing his fortune, he continued to teach himself languages: Slovenian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Latin, and Greek.

It was Greek that led him to a new world. From the very first, his relationship with the Greek language was a love affair. He was drunk with the beauty of the words. �How is it possible for any language to be so noble!� he wondered. He filled thirty-five copybooks with exercises in Greek. He read and reread Homer�s poems The Iliad and The Odyssey until he knew long sections by heart. Homer�s world of heroic splendor captured his imagination so totally that he carried the books with him wherever he went.

Heinrich began to tire of business. In his exercise books, he wrote, �I cannot remain a merchant any longer.� And: �How is it that I who have made three fortunes am so miserably unhappy?�

The decision to give up business was not an easy one. His success in the marketplace assured him that he was worthwhile � a man of substance. Outside the world of business, he was a nobody once more. He would have to invent himself all over again.

He began his new life by circling the globe. He visited countries that were all but unknown to most Europeans. During his world tour, he put up with bad weather, rough roads, and nasty food, but high prices never failed to rouse his sense of outrage.

On the sea voyage from Japan to California, he wrote his first book, China and Japan in Present Times. Once back in Europe, he passed through London and visited the Crystal Palace Park at Sydenham. There he saw copies of Egyptian temples, stone tools from a cave in France, and life-size models of dinosaurs. The next day he prowled the halls of the British Museum, looking at antiquities from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

His growing curiosity about the ancient world was not unusual for a man of his time. Heinrich was living in an age when the general public was becoming more knowledgeable about the distant past. �Prehistory� � the study of human beings before the invention of writing � was a new science. All over fashionable Europe, the ancient world had become the latest craze.

Heinrich was attracted by this new science, though he had not yet decided to become an archaeologist. He felt torn between the worlds of business and scholarship. He enrolled in the French university, the Sorbonne, but took time away from his classes to mount guard over his fortune. When he heard about economic opportunities in the United States, he headed for America. The year was 1867, and the slaves had been freed for four years.

Once in the United States, Heinrich found himself deeply moved by the ambition and intelligence of the former slaves. He wrote that any statements about the laziness of Negro freedmen were �downright falsehoods. . . . They are as willing and eager to work . . . as any workmen I have yet seen and . . . both morally and intellectually, they stand much higher than their former tyrants.� He sympathized with the former slaves� struggle to create a new and a better life. He had never forgotten what it was to be an underdog.

Heinrich celebrated his forty-sixth birthday alone, in New York City. Though he did not yet realize it, he was about to set off on a heroic quest: a lifelong search for the lost city of Troy.

Most modern scholars think that it was not until the age of forty-six that Heinrich Schliemann made up his mind to look for Troy, the lost city of Homer�s Iliad. Before 1868, there is nothing about finding Troy in the thousands of letters and papers written by Heinrich Schliemann. If � as Heinrich maintained later in life � he had dreamed of finding the lost city since he was seven years old, it was a dream he had never shared. It was a dream he had buried as deep as Troy itself.

And it was a peculiar dream. Most of the scholars of Schliemann�s day doubted whether Troy was a real place. Homer�s war poem The Iliad was considered the greatest epic of all time, but it was considered to be fictional, an invented tale. Troy was a place in a story, like Oz or Narnia or Neverland.

Heinrich, of course, wanted the story to be true. He wanted to believe that the Trojan War was a real war that happened just the way Homer said it did. If current scholarship held that Troy was a myth, the scholars were wrong. Heinrich preferred the historians of ancient Greece.

The ancient Greek writers believed that there had once been a great war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Greek historians like Thucydides (c. 460�400 BCE) and Herodotus (c. 484�425 BCE) considered the Trojan War part of their ancient history, and although they couldn�t be sure exactly when it occurred, they agreed that it took place roughly eight hundred years before their time, around 1250 BCE. Greek historians came up with these dates by keeping track of family histories and stories: �Let�s see, my grandfather said his grandfather said his grandfather said . . .� This is not the most accurate way to keep track of historic events, but the Trojan War took place before the Greeks adopted an alphabet from the Phoenicians and began to write.

The ancient Greek historians also agreed that Homer lived four to six hundred years after the Trojan War. It is most likely that Homer�s two great works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were composed orally and sung by bards. During the seventh century, the Greeks became fully literate, and different versions of the poems were tacked together and written down.

The years 1868 and 1869 were remarkable ones in Heinrich�s life. He retired from business, appointed himself Homer�s champion, and divorced his wife.

He began to dream of a Greek bride: dark-haired, interested in Homer, and � if possible � beautiful. He had no desire for a rich bride. He knew he was not handsome, and he hoped to make up for it with a well-padded wallet and a knowledge of foreign languages. He told his Greek tutor, Theokletos Vimpos, that he wanted his future wife to love learning �because otherwise she cannot love and respect me.� Above all, he wished for �a good and loving heart.�

As it happened, Theokletos had an unmarried niece: dark-haired, bookish, and poor. Sophia Engastromenos was only sixteen years old when her photograph was sent to the forty-seven-year-old millionaire. Her youth frightened Heinrich. He was afraid that so young a girl would have her heart set on romance. But Sophia�s photograph enchanted him, and at last he declared that he had fallen in love.

Having fallen in love with Sophia, it only remained to meet her. The Engastromenos family was excited by the prospect of having a millionaire in the family, and Sophia was bundled into her sister�s best dress. When Heinrich spoke to her alone, he asked her point-blank, �Why do you wish to marry me?� Sophia replied, �Because my parents have told me that you are a rich man!�

Heinrich flew into a temper and marched back to his hotel room to sulk. The Engastromenos family huddled around Sophia, begging her to send a letter of apology. Sophia wrote that she had not meant to offend her suitor; she had answered honestly because she believed that he wanted the truth.

Heinrich forgave her. By this time, he was head over heels in love. For the second time in his life, he married a woman he had barely met, a woman whose family was in need of money. This time, his wife was thirty years younger than himself � Sophia was so young that she smuggled her dolls along on her honeymoon.

Poor Sophia! During the first months of married life, Heinrich dragged her to museums all over Europe. She preferred the circus. He lavished expensive gifts upon her, supervised her diet, and drew up a gymnastics program that he thought would keep her healthy. He pestered her to learn foreign languages. She suffered from headaches, stomachaches, and homesickness.

And yet the marriage was not a disaster. Sophia Schliemann was loving and wise beyond her years. She relieved Heinrich�s deep loneliness. She made up her mind that �Henry� was a genius and that geniuses were not quite like other people. She even awakened a streak of playfulness in his nature � on their honeymoon in Venice, he dived headfirst out of a gondola in order to make her laugh. She called him her �friend for life� and �dearest husband.�

As for �Henry,� his love and respect for Sophia increased as he came to know her better. To him, she was his �adored wife and everlasting friend.� He admired her mind as well as her beauty and concluded, �I knew I loved and needed a woman of her grandeur.�

Though finding �Priam�s treasure� was the thrill of a lifetime, it created a dilemma for Heinrich. According to the rules of the firman, half of the excavated goods belonged to the Turks. Heinrich had two choices: he could surrender half the treasure, or he could keep it a secret. He could not publish his great discovery without losing half of what he had found.

Either option was more than body and soul could bear. Heinrich could not wait to dazzle the public. He believed that the Trojan gold would bring him undying glory. The temptation to publish his finds was irresistible.

On the other hand, he could not stand to part with any of the treasure. Heinrich had a childish �finders-keepers� feeling about the Trojan gold. It was his connection to Homer, something he could hold in his hands. He had borne heat and dust and ridicule for it. He could not let it go.

The solution to this problem was a crooked one. Heinrich was neither the first nor the last archaeologist to resort to it. He smuggled the treasure out of the country. No one knows exactly how he did it: he may have been helped by the Calvert brothers or by members of Sophia�s family, but the finding of the treasure was kept a secret. Once the gold left Turkey, Heinrich closed down the excavation and returned to Athens. There he photographed the treasure and wrote articles about its finding.

When the articles were published, Heinrich was in trouble, as he fully deserved to be. Though Greece and Turkey had been at odds for hundreds of years, the Greek government agreed that Schliemann ought to return the treasure to the Turks. When the authorities came to claim it, the treasure had vanished again. It seems likely that Heinrich divided it among the members of the Engastromenos family, who hid it in caves and barns.

Heinrich knew that he might go to jail, but didn�t care. �I kept everything valuable that I found for myself and thus saved it for science,� he wrote self-righteously. Guards surrounded the house. Policemen searched his belongings. The Schliemann bank accounts were frozen. Heinrich was questioned about the whereabouts of the treasure, but he kept his mouth shut. Only once did he come close to admitting his guilt. The Turks had arrested Effendi Amin, the watchman who had been hired to keep an eye on the Schliemann excavation. Heinrich felt no shame about stealing the treasure or smuggling it out of the country, but it distressed him that Effendi Amin should be put in jail for what he had done. He wrote to the Turkish government, pointing out that the loss of the treasure was not Amin�s fault � he had done his best. He begged them, �in the name of humanity� to set Amin free.

There was a long court case. Eventually the Turks gave up and agreed that Heinrich should pay them for the treasure, a fine of fifty thousand francs. He joyfully sent five times that amount and a number of artifacts he did not greatly admire. Once again, his luck had held. Perhaps Hermes, the Greek god of thieves, protected him. Against all odds, he was able to keep the Trojan gold.

During the last ten years of his life, Heinrich was often tired and sick. His earaches tortured him, and he suffered from malaria. In spite of his illness, he continued to travel, to swim, to write, and to dig.

In 1890, he returned once more to Hissarlik. It was his twelfth visit, and little had changed: it was still a place of owls and scorpions, poisonous snakes, wind and dust. On this particular visit, Heinrich did rather a mysterious thing: he began to excavate outside the walls of �his� Homeric Troy.

It may have been D�rpfeld�s idea. Or it may have been Heinrich�s � he had always been haunted by the fact that his prehistoric city was so small. In any event, once the two men dug outside the boundaries of what Heinrich had claimed was Troy, they came upon two buildings similar to the Bronze Age palace at Tiryns. Inside, at last, they found what Heinrich had been looking for: pottery similar to that he had found at Mycenae. As if that were not enough, there was one last treasure � four stone axes of polished green jade and lapis lazuli. �I saw Pallas Athena in front of me,� wrote Heinrich, �holding in her hands those treasures which are more valuable than all those I uncovered at Mycenae. . . . I cried for joy, fondled and kissed her feet. I thanked her from the bottom of my heart.� He was later to smuggle the axes out of the country. He was not to be reformed.

Heinrich�s last visit to Hissarlik uncovered more than treasure. At long last, he discovered the part of Hissarlik that matched the Bronze Age palace at Tiryns and the Bronze Age pottery he had unearthed at Mycenae. Historians are still wondering whether Schliemann fully understood what this latest find meant. What it meant, of course, is that the part of Hissarlik that he had maintained was Homeric Troy (Troy 2) did not date from the Bronze Age and was therefore not the Troy of Homer�s Iliad. The books and articles that he had published were all wrong. Moreover, if this newly discovered layer of the mound (later called Troy 6) was Homer�s Troy, he had thrown great heaps of it away. During his earlier attacks on Hissarlik, he had dug straight through the layer that he was trying to find. In his frenzy, he had destroyed buildings and artifacts that dated from the time of the Trojan War.

Wilhelm D�rpfeld, who excavated Troy 6 after Heinrich�s death, had his own story about Heinrich�s understanding of this latest find. He maintained that he broke the news to Heinrich and explained to the older man what the new findings signified: that Heinrich�s earlier theories were wrong. �I discussed the matter with Schliemann, who listened carefully without saying much. He then retired into his own tent and remained incommunicado for four days. When he finally came out, he quietly said to me: �I think you are right.��

It was perhaps the most extraordinary moment of an extraordinary life.

Though I have consulted all the books in the bibliography, the following sources were especially helpful:

Partial funding for the writing of this book was made possible by a grant from the Park School of Baltimore through its F. Parvin Sharpless Faculty and Curricular Advancement Program.

Text copyright � 2006 by Laura Amy Schlitz