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CHAPTER V.
The Seventh City—The Greek and Roman Ilium.[1]
§ I.—Buildings, and Objects found in them.
As I am describing our works at Troy in 1882 in the order of the antiquity of the settlements, I come now in the last place to the ruins of Ilium, though, in commencing our labours from the top of the hill of Hissarlik, these were naturally the first we had to excavate and to study. As before mentioned (see p. 18), I brought to light in the excavation on the northern slope (in the place marked by the most northern letter V on Plan I. in Ilios) a very remarkable wall-corner. It is about six mètres above the plain, and consists of large well-wrought blocks of shelly limestone, joined without any binding material. It belongs apparently to the Macedonian time, and probably formed part of the grand wall of defence which Lysimachus built for Ilium. It has courses of masonry, alternately higher and lower, which are wrought on the outside with rusticated surfaces. It appears that all the more ancient buildings here, with the exception of the great temple of Athené, built by Lysimachus, consist of a shelly conglomerate,
- ↑ I here remark that I use for the historic Ilium of the Greek and Roman age the simple and only name by which it occurs in the classical writers; for Strabo's ἡ νῦν πόλις, τὸ σημερινὸν Ιλιον, are merely distinguishing phrases, not names; and even these are used by no other writer. It is the more important to mention this, as the modern phrase, Ilium Novum, or Novum Ilium, which I reluctantly adopted in Ilios, has been mistaken even by some scholars for a genuine classical appellation; and this has helped to perpetuate the delusion of the two different sites, which have been marked on maps, since Lechevalier invented the distinction, as Ilium Novum (at Hissarlik, which he never visited), and Troja Vetus (at Bounarbashi).
