The Greek Treasure: A Biographical Novel of Henry and Sophia Schliemann.

Be it Michelangelo or Henry Schliemann, be it a chisel or a pick, there's always a lot of wood to chop in one of Irving Stone's factually fortified biographies of great men of obdurate vigor. Schliemann was certainly the most single-minded of these when in middle age, rich & retired from business, he decided to uncover the city of Troy destroyed some 3000 years ago. At this time he also married the young (only 17) Sophia who stayed by his side in situ during the years of endless excavations, even after little Andromache & Agamemnon were born. For Schliemann it was to be "A life sentence... Sometimes I don't know which is the prisoner in this mount. Troy or myself." But then there were the 1st coins & medals and vertebrae, and later Priam's gold and silver (which the Turkish government would contest). Schliemann was an arbitrary man, stingy with Sophia & her family tho no price was too great to pay for his lifework which he subsidized, while he drove himself unremittingly toward his own sepulcher.