Ohio History Journal

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BOOK  REVIEWS

SCHLIEMANN IN INDIANAPOLIS. Edited by

Eli Lilly. (Indianapolis: Indiana His-

torical Society, 1961. ix??95p.; illus-

trations, appendix, and index. $5.00.)

Heinrich Schliemann is known to all

lovers of ancient Greece for his excava-

tions of the site of ancient Troy and for

other diggings which established his rep-

utation as the first modern archaeologist.

Relatively few, however, know of his vis-

its to the United States and his sojourn

in Indianapolis. The latter is the main

theme of the diary and letters culled from

the Schliemann papers and reproduced

in this little volume.

Schliemann was a remarkable linguist.

At the age of thirty-four, he learned to

speak and write Russian in six weeks.

Many of his letters written from Indian-

apolis to scholars all over the world were

originally composed in German, French,

English, and Greek. Schliemann first

came to the United States in 1850. He

joined the gold rush to California, went

into business in San Francisco, and

quickly doubled his money. Everything

he touched seemed to turn to gold. He

had many holdings in the United States,

especially in government bonds and bank

and railroad stocks, the income from

which helped finance his many archaeo-

logical ventures.

The reason for his American voyage

in 1869 was to get a divorce from his

Russian wife, who refused to leave her

native land. Completing his naturaliza-

tion as an American citizen, which he

had begun in 1851, within three days of

his arrival in New York, Schliemann

moved to Indianapolis, having learned

that Indiana's divorce laws were more

lenient than those of most other states.

He established a residence in Indianap-

olis, acquired some property, and waited

for the court to hand down its decree.

Freed from his first wife, he quickly em-

barked upon another matrimonial ad-

venture. This time he married a seven-

teen-year-old Greek girl, who had been

recommended by the archbishop of

Greece, Schliemann's former teacher. The

enthusiastic Homer scholar was con-

vinced that he could be happy only with

a Greek, even though she was a third his

age. Their offspring he named Andro-

mache and Agamemnon.

Schliemann's American diary and the

Indianapolis letters touch upon a variety

of subjects, from Sunday closing laws

and Irish and German immigrants to es-

says on the origin of the Arabian Nights,

the contents of a classical education, the

best methods for studying a foreign lan-

guage, and a variety of more trivial items

which attracted the attention of an ob-

servant traveler.

This little volume is an interesting bit

of Americana, concerned with a brief

period in the life of one of the world's