Word: schliemanns
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...Heinrich Schliemann: The Myth and the Scandal--with William Calder, professor of classics with the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. In the Boylston Hall auditorium...
...broader ocean" than any previous explorer, when he sought to circle the globe; Captain James Cook, first to sail to Antarctica, "a frigid continent girded by icebergs, some the size of mountains, others smaller,...all tossed and churned by gutsy winds and unpredictable heavy seas"; Heinrich and Sophia Schliemann, "a quixotic archaeologist with a beautiful wife directing a hundred and fifty rebellious workmen on the exotic Turkish landscape" to find the ruins of Homer's Troy...
...most university-trained scholars, Schliemann's notion was pathetically naive. Homer himself they considered to be not one man but a loose guild of poets, and Troy merely a vivid legend with no basis in fact. Schliemann had money, unlimited energy and formidable intellectual powers on his side of the argument. He is said to have been able to learn a new language in three weeks...
Stone picks up Schliemann's story a year earlier, when, at 47, he married his second wife, a 17-year-old Greek girl named Sophia. Her strength was a good match for Henry's. At the Hissarlik digs, she supervised excavation crews, classified artifacts and helped her husband smuggle out of Turkey a huge and ela orately worked store of gold objects−presumed by the exultant Schliemann to be the fabled treasure of Priam...
Stone's archaeology and history are accurate. He also had access to the Schliemann archives at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. He was even able to see most of the unpublished correspondence between Schliemann and Sophia. But the book's main flaw is that it observes Schliemann solely through the eyes of a wife who never saw him until he was middleaged. Novelizing thus gets in the way of biography; the reader is on hand for the exciting excavation scenes, but not for the development of a mind as rich and extraordinary as Troy itself...