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If only he hadnt taken it into his head to digest a sleepy backwater village for troys walls and somehow found them.
If he hadnt knelt in the dirt all day with beautiful Sophia chipping away crust from the tiles of Priams palace, from bracelets that had once circled the slim wrists of princesses, if he hadnt proven that his dream was graspable, that the stories he loved were fashioned in the high style, not to escape the world but to remember it.
A tribute to the dead.
To the dead bright ones, whose gestures, vivid as they are in song, were doubtless in the flesh, more dazzling.
So that was a poem about Heinrich Schliemann by the american poet Karl Davis.
And right there, Tom, you have this sort of sense of the dead bright ones, more dazzling, more terrifying in the flesh than they were in reality.
And as that poem suggests, Schliemann's great fame.
We ended the last episode by talking about this german archaeologist who is famous for having inadvertent commons discovered Troy.
His fame is bound up with the idea, isn't it, that the stories we talked about last time are true, that there was a trojan war, that there might have even been a wooden horse, that there was a Helen of Troy?
So we teased this at the end of the last episode.
Let's get into it.
Who is Heinrich Schliemann?
Probably the most famous archaeologist who ever lived.
So Schliemann, he was the son of a lutheran pastor who got caught up in a sex scandal.
Oh, no.
And so the young Heinrich was kind of impoverished and humiliated, but discovered that he had an incredible aptitude for languages and ended up a fabulously wealthy businessman.