66 Conquest
not a substantial proportion of them are, in fact, at least distantly related by
blood. Time and time again, in recent years, DNA studies have shown that
particular peoples who claim a common ancestry are, in fact, for the most part
of common descent.^6 It is, moreover, as this suggests, a mistake to suppose that
oral traditions having to do with the foundation of communities and the great
crises they weather are apt to die out quickly.^7
More can be said of particular pertinence to Hellas. For the Greeks were
peculiar. Among them, as the Homeric epics both testify and preach, remem-
brance loomed large. In Mycenaean and post-Mycenaean Greece, manners
and mores were aristocratic; and, in and before the classical period, Greeks of
rank—the Spartans above all others—were obsessed both with genealogy and
with the tales told concerning the foundation of the communities in which
they and others lived. Like Arabs of similar stature today, the well-born in an-
cient Hellas regarded knowing who they and their neighbors were and whence
they all came as a matter of the highest importance.^8
Rarely, moreover, did the stewards of memory have anything like a fully
free hand. In ancient Hellas, there were constraints on the formation of tradi-
tion, and these were favorable to its veracity. In the archaic and classical peri-
ods, Greece was divided into something on the order of one thousand indepen-
dent, jealous, quarreling, often mutually hostile political communities—each
with its own ruling order, its own peculiar interests, its own civic religion, its
own agenda, and its own traditions.^9 Where Hellenic traditions are utterly
incompatible with one another, as is sometimes the case, we may be at a loss—
as Herodotus, the first to confront this problem, readily acknowledges he
sometimes was.^10 But where they coincide or overlap, where the ancestral lore
of one Greek community dovetails with that of one or more others, as is com-
monly the case, we would be ill-advised to dismiss its testimony out of hand—
for, most of the time, the only plausible reason for such a consensus is that, in
its rough outlines, the tradition happens to be true.
There is one more indication that Greek tradition deserves attention and
respect. Time and again, the hyperskepticism to which classical scholarship is
periodically prone has been belied by new discoveries. Heinrich Schliemann
may have lacked the intellectual sophistication possessed by those who dis-
missed his enterprise as a crackpot endeavor, but when he uncovered the ruins
of ancient Troy in Anatolia, of Mycenae and Tiryns in the Peloponnesus, and
of Orchomenos in Boeotia, he demonstrated that, with regard to the Greek
legends, naive credulity is more apt to bring one close to the truth than is a