About This Show
What Mad Pursuit, written by Julian Keith, tells the story of Heinrich Schliemann and his lovely young wife Sophia who have already excavated the site they believed to be ancient Troy, where they have discovered a cache of gold and jewels they identified as the treasure of King Priam.
They have also excavated Mycenae, where they found what they believed to be the remains of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. They were wrong, but in both cases their discoveries were of immensely greater significance than they knew.
They had found evidence of a culture hitherto unsuspected – the Aegean
Bronze Age. On a warm evening in Athens the Schliemanns were visited by young Arthur Evans and his wife Margaret. Evans had recently been released
from an Austrian prison where he had been confined on a charge of espionage in the Balkan states. The couple was on a final trip around Greece before returning to England, where Evans would take up the post of Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Ten years later he excavated the Palace of Minos at Knossos, where he found the oldest European civilization of all.
What Mad Pursuit speculates on that evening in Athens and its consequences for the Evans, the Schliemanns, and our understanding of
the history of the human race. Lisa L. Abbott directs.
