The surprising truth about old myths

I visited Mycenae for the first time this autumn. While the ruins of classical Athens can seem almost familiar, the ancient hillfort of a millennia earlier truly feels as though it belongs to the world of gods and heroes, of Homer and the Trojan War. If my imagination hadn’t been destroyed by decades of television, I could almost imagine myself there.

Walking past ancient burial mounds and gazing at Argos in the near distance, I liked to think that I was in the footsteps of a real Agamemnon – and perhaps I was, and there really was a king of that name who led a war across the sea. If that sounds fantastic, then one of the curiosities of recent findings in both archaeology and DNA is that many of the old myths we once regarded as fantasy appear to be true (or, at least, true-ish). Mycenae was among the sites excavated by Heinrich Schliemann, the great German businessman, polylinguist, serial liar and classics enthusiast who discovered the city of Troy in 1870. Troy was assumed to be a real place in antiquity and the Middle Ages, but with the early modern period, and the rise of scepticism, it became obvious to educated people that its existence was merely a myth, or a ‘romance’ in Blaise Pascal’s words.

Schliemann thought otherwise and, with the self-confidence of an amateur Victorian adventurer, proved them wrong – although his excavating was so notoriously reckless that he managed to destroy much of the city, as one academic noted dryly, doing as much damage as the Greeks. Schliemann identified the spot in what is now north-west Turkey where a succession of cities had been built on top of each other, and subsequent digs formed a consensus that ‘Troy VI’, dating from around 1700 to 1300 bc, fits with the historical timeframe of the war.