Page:Mycenaean Troy.djvu/29

 stronghold. In early times many believed that it was Priam's citadel. This is not strange, for so strategic is its position that Count von Moltke writes: "We who are no scholars allow ourselves to be guided solely by military instinct to the spot which, in old times as well as now, men would have selected for an inaccessible citadel."

The mention of objects familiar only to one who knows the Trojan country suggests that the poet had seen the Troad; that, as he observed the sun set behind Imbros and "wooded" Samothrace, bringing them boldly out in the ruddy glow of the twilight, he pictured deity on the mountain's topmost crest. A man as conservative in this matter as Professor Christ is led to assert (Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur, 1898, p. 55): "His descriptions of Mount Ida, of the plain of the Scamander (, 773), of Poseidon's high lookout from Samothrace (, 10) are so true to nature (zeigen so viel Naturwahrheit) that we must