Truth in the old myths

On Troy, King Arthur and the Flood of Noah

This originally appeared in the Spectator Christmas issue

I visited Mycenae for the first time this autumn. While the ruins of classical Athens feel almost familiar - ‘air we can breathe’, as one historian described ancient Greece - the ancient hill fort of a millennia earlier takes us truly into 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, although familiar to western Europeans since the 17^th century, was among the sites excavated by Heinrich Schliemann, the great German businessman, polylinguist, serial liar and classics enthusiast who famously discovered the city of Troy in 1870.