"The material [Homer] used (c. 850 BC) had existed for many hundreds of years, passed on orally. In the most vivid and lively language he gives a dear picture of men's minds as well as their actions. These tales were accepted as a true record of events in Homer's own time and in classical Greece as well as during the whole of the Roman period and throughout the Middle Ages; it was the scepticism of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century scholarship which damned them as being mere fairy-tales. Then, during the last years of the nineteenth century, the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans transmuted what was thought to be the base metal of unfounded legend into the pure gold of ascertained fact. They uncovered Troy itself and Golden Mycenae, and the palaces of Minos in Crete...Wonderful as these material discoveries were, perhaps their greatest value was the proof that the story of Troy was no legend, but an historical event. This makes sense of the vivid realism of Homer's characters, his attention to small details of behaviour—how clearly we see the sleeping Diomedes...Here indeed is flesh to cover the archaeological bones."