Word: priam
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Where the story breaks down, though, it breaks down in a big way. That's almost certainly the case with what Schliemann called Priam's Treasure, a group of spectacular objects he found in 1873. "I cut out the treasure with a large knife," Schliemann wrote, "which it was impossible to do without the very greatest exertion and the most fearful risk of my life, for the great fortification wall, beneath which I had to dig, threatened every moment to fall down upon...
Traill eventually turned up so many discrepancies that he branded Schliemann a "pathological liar" who invented events in his diaries and books or appropriated them from other people's lives. The discovery of Priam's Treasure was evidently one more such invention. Schliemann wrote that he slipped the objects into the shawl of his second wife, Sophia, to hide them from larceny-minded laborers. According to his field notes, it didn't happen that way at all. Besides, Sophia was in Greece at the time...
...many devices," thinks up the ruse of the Trojan horse, Troy falls. In Trojan Women by Euripides, the women are to be parceled out among the victors. Queen Hecuba (Eliza Ward) leads the women in a keening catalogue of I woe: she has lost her husband Priam, her son Hector, and will eventually lose all of her children...
This is the gory part of the epic: blood lust and revenge couched in the name of justice. Polymestor (Oliver Ford Davies) is an erstwhile friend of Troy to whom King Priam and Queen Hecuba sent their youngest son, Polydorus, for safekeeping-along with a stock of gold. But in Greek tragedy, today's friend is tomorrow's fiend...
...King Priam (1961) borrowed from the Iliad to examine moral choices in a time of war. The Knot Garden (1970) sorted out a maze of sexual and psychological bonds against a backdrop of freedom fighting, racism and analysis...