Stoned at Troy

By John Skow

THE GREEK TREASURE by IRVING STONE 479 pages. Doubleday. $10.95.

It is a bit late to complain about Irving Stone, who provides novelized biographies for readers who want Vincent Van Gogh and Michelangelo to wear boxer shorts and talk like members of the local school board. Perhaps that is why Stone, in his latest book, persistently calls the historical Heinrich Schliemann "Henry."

Schliemann was the self-taught amateur archaeologist who a century ago used clues in The Iliad to discover and excavate Priam's Troy. He was a truly astonishing man, a German who grubbed away his early youth as an impoverished clerk, then by his middle 20s made a fortune in Russia selling tea, olive oil and indigo. Schliemann traveled to California in 1850, when he was 28, and made another fortune provisioning gold miners. He returned to Russia and accumulated still an other pot of money, and finally retired at 41 with an ambition that seemed to have blown into his skull like an owl through an open window. He wanted to find Troy, the fortified city to which Paris abducted Helen, and which the Achaean heroes Menelaus, Agamemnon, Ajax, Achilles and Odysseus be sieged for ten years.

To 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.

To him, Homer's descriptions of Troy's walls and gates sounded like history, not storytelling. And in excavations begun in 1870 at Hissarlik, a Turkish settlement south of the Dardanelles, he proved that he was right.

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.

Marble Mansion. By the time Europe's scholars had grudgingly accepted the Schliemanns' discovery, the two had repeated their feat of literary and archaelogical detection by finding a second trove of prehistoric gold artifacts in a series of ancient royal tombs. One of them was perhaps Agamemnon's burial site at Mycenae.

This is exciting stuff, but Stone fleshes it out with far too much flabby imagining about the Schliemanns' domestic tensions. Will Sophia produce a son for Henry? Will she endure his abundant eccentricities? Will she put up with the vast marble mansion he builds for himself in Athens?

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.

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