Such was the outlook of Grote’s contemporaries. Then an important thing happened. A poor boy named Schliemann had been told these Greek fables by his father, and to his child’s mind the stories appeared as literally true. One day a drunken miller came into the grocer’s shop where he worked, and began to recite some lines of Homer. Schliemann was fascinated, and, so the story goes, spent all his spare cash in whisky wherewith to encourage the miller to repeat the lines again and again; and then prayed God that he might some day have the happiness of learning Greek himself. His literal faith in the “myths” remained with him, and he made up his mind to find the walls of Troy. Being poor he had to spend a lifetime of hard saving before he was in a position to put his faith to the test. Late in life, however, he had saved enough money for the purpose and went to Hissarlik, the spot in Asia Minor where the town of Troy was said to have stood. He began digging into the earth, and to his joy discovered the buried walls of a town. It was proved later that the walls he discovered belonged not to the Homeric city, as Schliemann naturally assumed, but to another city which had existed on the same site a thousand years earlier. He had dug within and through the circle of the Homeric walls without discovering them. From Troy he went to Mycenæ and Tiryns on the Greek mainland, and there discovered the visible relics of the Homeric stories centering on the Greek mainland. Schliemann’s achievement was to establish the historical existence of the “Mycenæan civilization.” We now know that this civilization flourished from about 1400 B.C. to 1100 B.C. It is a romantic story of the way in which Schliemann justified his simple faith in the historic background of the Homeric poems. Schliemann deserved the explorer’s satisfaction which he enjoyed, and which manifested itself on one occasion when he sent a telegram to the King of the Hellenes announcing that he had found the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenæ. One wishes that it had been literally true, as Schliemann thought it was. In any case it was he who laid the foundations for the whole structure of modern prehistoric research in the Eastern Mediterranean. The most exciting and the most important part of that research has been the opening up of Crete. The Cretan discoveries of Sir Arthur Evans and other excavators, British, American and Italian, have proved that the Mycenæan culture revealed by Schliemann was itself a late and even decadent phase of a great Mediterranean civilization which had its centre in Crete. Chapter 2: _The Sea-Faring People of Crete_