Heinrich Schliemann’s famous story about his childhood-dream to excavate Troy as an adult has often been doubted. This was started by W. M. Calder on occasion of Schliemann’s 150th anniversary of his birth, when he gave his legendary lecture at Neubukow about Schliemann’s many false statements in his autobiographies. The present paper argues that this alleged vow of an eight year old boy is an imitation of the well known story of little Hannibal promising his father to be an enemy of the Romans for all his life. Schliemann’s immediate source for this story probably was G. L. Jerrer’s “Weltgeschichte fur Kinder”, where Schliemann could find not only an illustration of Troy and its burning walls, but also the story of Hannibal’s vow and a picture showing Hannibal on the Alps posing as an archaeologist ‚avant la lettre‘.