Archaeology and Heinrich Schliemann 2012

Schliemann’s initial views on Homer: Biographical, literary, and touristic origins of a cultivated image of naïveté 369even though Warsberg’s scattered remarks about hismore illustrious contemporary are uniformly negative.As his boat makes its first docking on the island,Warsberg feels “just like Odysseus returning home”. 18Like Schliemann, he finds modern-day Ithaca conduciveto imagining oneself transported back in timeto the days of Odysseus. “In mildness, quiet, and thepatriarchal provinciality of circumstances one forgetsthe present and really lives as if in the Odyssean pastafter just a few days ... Verily, I have led a Homericlife in Ithaca”. 19 Like Schliemann, he encounters anidyllic utopia in Ithaca and writes, far more pointedlythan Schliemann: “Ithaca is the only real republicof the utopic dreams of socialism and equality”. 20Everywhere he finds faces, native customs, harbors,and scenes of daily life reminiscent of the Odyssey,much as Schliemann had done.Yet Warsberg’s beautifully written and inspiredchapter on Ithaca also helps us to identify, by way ofcontrast, the eccentricities of Schliemann’s account.First, Warsberg conceives the Homeric poems expresslyas an aesthetic and not as a historiographicalwork. In matching, as Schliemann had done, variouslocalities on the island to those mentioned in Homer’spoem, he identifies them as the settings for a literarywork, not as the sites of genuine historical events.Second, and more significantly, Warsberg distanceshimself from scholarly pretensions in the idyllicaccount of his experience. He avoids Schliemann’smistake of trying to please both laymen and scholars.In the introduction of his Odysseeische Landschaftenhe makes no secret of his scorn of scholars: “Only byforgetting the falsifications of our scholastic studies,which is difficult to achieve by peaceful means, foronly violent revolutions succeed at making tabularasa ... can one hope to revive, reactualize, commenton and explain the Iliad and the Odyssey. 21 UnlikeSchliemann, who used all means at his disposal togain the approbation of the scholarly world, Warsbergwas keenly aware, from the outset, of the discursiverules as well as the limitations of his scholarlycontemporaries. He eschews, for example, thescholarly over-emphasis on Greek mythology inattempts to reconstruct the religious beliefs of the ancientGreeks. About two decades ahead of his time,Warsberg instead insists - without being able to formulateit as such - on a more anthropological approachthat deduces religious practices from out of the contextof the Mediterranean lifestyle and the practicesand attitudes of everyday life. He closes his attack onthe philologists with an appeal to the reader: “Neverlet yourself be intimidated in any way by mere scholarliness.Its status is purely servile, and wherever iterects itself as an end in itself ... so strike it all themore boldly on its head, for you have the divinespark and the genuinely fruitful and fundamentallycreative vital force more in your own innate, simplyfound common sense than in the understanding ofothers’ gathered wisdom.” 22 Only in the final sectionof his chapter on Ithaca does Warsberg condescend totry his own hand at making a few scholarly remarkson the Odysseus, but not before first “confessing apart of these sins against the holy spirit of the poet.” 23Let us now try to summarize the origins of Schliemann’sseemingly naïve belief in the absolute historicityof Homer in Ithaque, le Péloponnèse et Troie.On the one hand, the influence of nineteenth-centurytourism seems to have inclined him to view specificlocalities in Greece and the Troad not merely as settingschosen by Homer for fictive events, but asplaces that one can fantasize about as having witnessedactual historical events. Schliemann supposed,wrongly, that his readers would be willing to suspendtheir natural skepticism in favor of awe andenjoyment in the way that vacationing tourists areoften willing to do. On the other hand, Schliemannalso miscalculated when he assumed that he couldmix scholarly and literary modes of writing. He wantedto have it both ways: to impress the scholars andearn the admiration of lay Homer enthusiasts. Hisnaïve belief in the historicity of Homer may reflect,therefore, less an intellectual deficit than an inaccurateappraisal of readers’ reactions to his mixture ofwriting modes. In other words, the embarrassingaspects of Ithaque, le Péloponnèse et Troie reflect notso much naïveté on Schliemann’s part as a miscalculationabout his readers. Once the fiasco became obviousto Schliemann, he was only too happy, in subsequentworks, to portray himself as a romantic whoseinitial views on Homer were those of a naïve enthusi-18. Warsberg 1878-79, vol III, 132.19. Ibid, vol III, 141.20. Ibid, vol III, 143-144.21. Warsberg 1878-79, vol I, vi.22. Ibid, vol III, 241.23. Ibid, vol III, 302.