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Updated: June 21, 2025
The following extract is taken from a memorandum Butler made of a visit he paid to Greece and the Troad in the spring of 1895. There are no such springs near Hissarlik, where they ought to be, but the American Consul at the Dardanelles told Butler there was something of the kind on Mount Ida, at the sources of the Scamander, and he determined to see them after visiting Hissarlik.
Besieged and expelled from Byzantium by the Athenians, he did not return to Sparta; but news came that he had settled at Colonae in the Troad, and was intriguing with the barbarians, and that his stay there was for no good purpose; and the ephors, now no longer hesitating, sent him a herald and a scytale with orders to accompany the herald or be declared a public enemy.
It traverses the most affecting regions of the world, and describes no one of them: the Troad and we get only his childish raptures over Pope's "Homer's Iliad"; Stamboul and he recounts the murderous services rendered by the Golden Horn to the Assassin whose serail, palace, council chamber, it washes; Cairo but the Plague shuts out all other thoughts; Jerusalem but Pilgrims have vulgarized the Holy Sepulchre into a Bartholomew Fair.
I knew the bearing, but had enormously misjudged its distance and underrated its height, and so it was as a sign and a testimony, almost as a call from the neglected gods, and now I saw and acknowledged the snowy crown of the Mysian Olympus! Methley recovered almost suddenly, and we determined to go through the Troad together. My comrade was a capital Grecian.
In the Iliad, for example, the Phrygians are spoken of as immediate neighbours of the Trojans; and a considerable body of primitive Hellenic legend is based on the early presence of Phrygians not only in the Troad itself, but on the central west coast about the Bay of Smyrna and in the Caystrian plain, from which points of vantage they held direct relations with the immigrant Greeks themselves.
They mostly related to a violent controversy between the Squire and various archæological experts with regard to some finds in the Troad a year or two before the war, in which the Squire had only just escaped a serious libel suit, whereof indeed all the preliminaries were in the drawer.
Lucullus himself, in the first place, defeated off Lektum in the Troad, the king's ships, which showed themselves there, and again observing that Neoptolemus was stationed at Tenedos with a larger force, he sailed against him ahead of all the rest, in a Rhodian galley of five banks which was commanded by Demagoras, a man well affected to the Romans, and exceedingly skilful in naval battles.
In the same way, if the poet of a western poem does not dilate on the Troad and the people of Asia Minor as the poet of the ILIAD does, that is simply because the scene of the ILIAD is in Asia and the scene of the Odyssey is in the west, when it is not in No Man's land.
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