Mark Gagnon

The Greek army poured into Troy, and what followed was just a massacre.

Priam was killed at his own altar.

Hector's infant son was thrown from the walls.

The women of Troy were enslaved, and the city itself was burned to ashes.

Troy fell and the story became immortalized.

Now for over 2000 years, many scholars in the early modern period, they heard this story.

They read the actual source material and they went through and they were like, yeah, this is just a story.

This is a metaphor talking about, you know, like honor and tragedy and, you know, family and love.

This is not a real, this is just a play.

It's not a real thing.

Homer's world of gods and heroes.

It's just, it's not history.

This is just a literary invention and nothing more.

However, some 19th century classicists did suspect that a real site was perhaps behind the legend.

And then in the 1870s, a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann made a fantastic discovery.

But Mr. Schliemann, well, he was a complicated guy, okay, to put it mildly.

He was a self-made millionaire, a compulsive liar who would fabricate

the very own parts of his own autobiography, and an amateur archaeologist with a lot more ambition than actual archaeology insight.

He was convinced, against the scholarly consensus of the time, that Homer's Troy was a real place, and he believed that it was buried beneath a mound called Hisarlik in northwest Turkey, near the entrance to the Dardanelles.

Now, he started digging in 1870, and what he found stunned the world.