! The Greeks held so firmly to their past that we forget how far back they had to reach for it. It is easy to lose sight of the long centuries -- there were eight of them -- that separate the heroes of the Trojan War from the age of Socrates and Aeschylus, which paid homage to them. Much of what lay between was not an unbroken line of glory but a dim interregnum. The Mycenaean Greece that leveled Troy around 1200 B.C. was itself in ruins a hundred years later, smashed by Dorian invaders from the north. There followed a...
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