When I began visiting ancient sites, I thought many of the old stories foolish and sometimes had a hard time holding back my laughter or my critical questions. After all, I was raised to be polite and not to offend my hosts or tour guides or even the whole city that was welcoming me.

Over time, I was ever more pleased with my self-restraint, as I noticed that a traveler who laughs at everything he is told soon learns nothing. And so I listened. I listened to priests who showed me the places where gods had stood, to old men who knew which hero lay beneath an ancient stone, to guides who could tell me why a spring had its name. I wrote down what they said, even when I did not believe them.

There is much that men believe merely because they have heard it since childhood. The poets teach it, the choruses repeat it, and before a boy is old enough to ask whether a thing could have happened, he has already learned that it did.

Consider Theseus. I do not doubt that Theseus lived and was a king. His descendants ruled after him. These are things that belong to history. But must I therefore believe that he fought a creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull?

I have seen many strange things in my travels. I have never seen such a creature.

When I was younger, I thought that settled the matter. Remove what is impossible and perhaps what remains is the truth. A king remains when the Minotaur is gone. Thus one separates the grain from the chaff.

But by the time I came to Arcadia, I had begun to wonder whether I had been too quick.

The Greeks of old who were accounted wise did not always speak plainly. They spoke in riddles. They hid one thing inside another. The tale of Cronus, which once seemed to me merely absurd, I came to suspect might contain a kind of wisdom that was lost when men began to demand that every ancient story speak as plainly as an inscription on stone.

This does not mean that I now believe everything I am told. Far from it. Travel has made me harder to deceive.

But it has also made me slower to laugh.

Perhaps there is more than one way for an old story to be true. Perhaps the marvelous thing that never happened may nevertheless preserve something that did.

And so I began collecting these stories, sometimes finding some deeper meaning in them myself, sometimes not, and sometimes only years later when I returned to my notes or told these stories in conversation with others.

Let me share some of these stories with you, and you may decide for yourselves if they have any value other than commemorating the cultural heritage of localized Greek communities.

You may wonder why I write down small things.

I first began to understand this at Olympia.

I had heard of the great temple and the image of Zeus. Men cross the sea to see it. Poets have praised it, and those who have never stood before the god speak confidently of what Pheidias made.

Such things do not need me.

But when I came to Olympia, I discovered how much there was besides the things everyone knew. A statue stood beside another statue, a dedication beside another dedication, an altar beside an altar. Some commemorated victories known to every Greek. Others preserved the names of men whose victories had long been forgotten.

I began by asking the questions a traveler asks.

Who made this? Who dedicated it? How old is it?

Every answer led to another story. Sometimes two men gave me different answers. A guide confidently named the man represented by a statue; another told me the guide was wrong. Even at Olympia, where Greeks had gathered for centuries, memory did not speak with one voice.

And I began to notice the smaller things.

Outside a town there may be a stone beside the road. The people who live there tell you that a hero is buried beneath it. His name is not one Homer sang. Perhaps he defended that town in some war everyone else has forgotten. Perhaps he never lived at all.

Still, the people pour offerings there.

Should I pass by because the stone is small?

I have seen temples in ruins and statues whose names are no longer known. One man says an ancient image is Artemis; another says it is an older goddess whose name has been forgotten. I ask what I can. Often I leave knowing less than I wished.

But I have learned this:

Great things have many guardians. Small things have only the memory of those who live beside them.

And memory is mortal.

An old man dies, and the story he knew dies with him. A sanctuary falls. A village is abandoned. Men carry away the stones of an ancient building to make walls for a new one. Soon travelers pass without knowing there was ever anything there to see.

I cannot prevent this.

But I can write down what I saw.

The great temple and the broken stone belong to the same Greece. The story sung everywhere and the story remembered by one old priest are both parts of what we have received.

If I do not write down the small things, who will?

The city is large, and its people come from every nation. Its harbor is filled with ships, and merchants sell there things brought from countries whose names even I do not know. The citizens build higher than other men, as if they wished to leave as little distance as possible between themselves and the gods.

Near the center of the city, however, there is an empty place.

I asked what had stood there.

The man beside me named two towers. They had been greater in height than all the buildings around them, and sailors approaching the harbor could see them while the rest of the city was still hidden by the curve of the earth.

“They fell on the same day,” he said.

I asked whether they had been destroyed in war.

“Not war,” he answered.

Then, after a moment, he said, “Yes. War.”

I did not ask him which answer was true.

The day had begun with a clear sky. This was remembered by everyone. Men who could not recall what they had eaten the evening before could describe the color of that morning. Some had been walking to work. Some were already at their desks. Others were beneath the earth, traveling through tunnels toward the city. Each person remembered where he had been when he first heard.

This is one of the strange powers of terror. It divides a life into the time before and the time after.

The citizens have built at the place where the towers stood. Water descends into two great hollow spaces and disappears into darkness. Around them are written the names of the dead.

There are so many names that no traveler can remember them all.

This is why they have been written.

I saw a woman touch one name with her fingers. She did not weep. Perhaps she had wept before, or perhaps grief sometimes becomes too old for tears. She stood there for a long while, while strangers passed behind her.

A city remembers destruction in numbers.

A mother remembers one name.

The people told me many stories. Some concerned men who climbed upward while everyone else was descending. Others concerned those who carried strangers whom they had never seen before and would never see again. One man was remembered because he returned to help a companion. Another because, knowing that he would die, he spoke across a great distance to the woman he loved.

The poets would call such men heroes.

Perhaps they were. But I think that on that morning few had awakened intending to become heroes. They had expected only to work, to eat, to complain about small inconveniences, and to return home at the end of the day.

The city has built again, as cities must. Children who were not yet born when the towers fell now cross the place on their way to other things. New buildings rise above the harbor. Ships still arrive. Merchants still sell their wares. Those who look from a distance may think that nothing is missing.

Some say that this means the city has healed.

I do not know whether cities heal. I know only that they continue.

Before leaving, I turned back. The empty place was crowded with the living.

Yet it remained empty.

The old man told me that Homer was wrong.

He did not say this angrily. That would have been easier to dismiss. He said it as though he were correcting the name of a road.

I had stopped at a small sanctuary and asked, as I often do, why the people honored the god there. The old man who tended the place told me a story I had never heard. I listened until he came to the part that troubled me.

“That cannot be right,” I said. “Homer tells it differently.”

The old man shrugged.

“Homer was not from here.”

I almost laughed.

What Greek does not know Homer? We learn his verses when we are boys. He has given us Achilles and Odysseus, Hector and Helen, the anger of gods and the sorrows of men. When someone tells a story differently from Homer, it is natural to think that the other man has made a mistake.

But the old man was not embarrassed.

“My father told me this,” he said. “His father told him. And every year we do what you have seen us do here.”

He pointed toward the altar.

That silenced me.

Homer had verses. The old man had a place.

There was the temple. There was the altar blackened by sacrifices. There was the ceremony the people still performed. None of these proved that the old man's story had happened exactly as he told it. I had traveled too long to think that.

But neither could I say that Homer had disproved him.

I began to understand something that every traveler through Greece must eventually learn. The poets have preserved our common stories, but every country has memories of its own. The Argives tell one thing, the Spartans another. In Arcadia they remember what is unknown in Athens. Sometimes two neighboring towns disagree about where the same hero was buried.

At first such contradictions annoyed me. I wanted to know which story was true.

Now I am not always certain that this is the first question to ask.

A story told in one place for generations, attached to an altar, a grave, a spring, or a yearly sacrifice, has its own claim upon us. Perhaps the poet knew another tradition. Perhaps the people here preserved something the poet never heard. Perhaps both have changed what they received.

I wrote down what the old man told me.

I wrote down Homer too.

Let neither silence the other.

They showed me the grave outside the city.

There was little to see. A mound of earth, some stones darkened by age, and beside them the remains of offerings. The people told me that a hero was buried there, one who had defended their ancestors when enemies came against the city. They gave me his name, and they told me the deeds he had done.

I had heard another account.

According to that story, the hero had died far from this place. Some even said that he had never come to this country at all. I asked the man who had brought me to the grave about this.

He shrugged.

“My father brought me here,” he said. “His father brought him.”

This was not an answer to my question.

At least, I did not think it was.

I walked around the grave. There were small cups near the stones, and the remains of a wreath. Someone had poured wine there not long before. I was told that every year the people sacrificed to the hero and that, before certain contests, the young men came to the grave.

“Do you believe he is beneath us?” I asked.

The man looked surprised.

“Where else would he be?”

I could have told him.

I could have repeated the other stories I had heard and named the places that also claimed the hero. I have learned that the dead sometimes possess more graves than the living possess houses. Cities contend for heroes as they contend for land, and a famous tomb may bring honor to people who otherwise have little fame.

But I said nothing.

For I began to understand that there were two questions before me, and I had been asking only one.

Was the hero buried beneath these stones?

I did not know.

But another question was easier to answer.

Had the hero been here?

For generations, children had been brought to this place and told his story. Men had asked for his protection before battle. Victors had placed wreaths upon his grave. Fathers had stood where I was standing and pointed to the earth and said, “Here he lies.”

If there had once been another man beneath the stones, his name was gone. The hero had taken his place.

I do not say that belief makes a false story true. Stones do not change the bones beneath them, and the dead do not travel because the living wish them nearer.

But a grave is not only a place where bones are buried.

Sometimes it is a place where memory lives.

I wrote down what the people told me.

And I wrote down the other account as well.

The reader may decide where the hero died.

I can only say where I found him remembered.

In the Painted Stoa, I watched the Persians flee from Marathon. The painters had given them the moment before their defeat, when they still believed they might prevail, and the moment after, when they crowded toward the ships. A man beside me named the Athenians whom I should admire. I had not asked him to. He spoke as though he had stood among them.

Later I walked beyond the city gates, where the Athenians have buried those who fell in their wars. The men of Marathon lie apart on the field itself. Here were other names, on other stones. I could read who had died, but often the inscription told me less readily whether his city had won.

“Which war was this?” I asked an old man at one of the monuments.

He told me. Then he told me how bravely the men had fought. I asked what had happened afterward. For a moment he looked past the stone, toward the road. “They did not come home,” he said.

I had asked too much, or perhaps the wrong thing. The stone was not there to tell me why they had died. It was there because they had died, and because someone had refused to let their names disappear.

Still, I wondered what became of everything that had no stone. The counsel a city rejected. The island whose people remembered an Athenian ship differently. The day when the Athenians waited for help and none came. No city has enough walls to inscribe every part of its history.

I do not blame them for painting Marathon. I stood before it longer than I intended. Nor would I have a father speak first of a battle lost when he leads his son past the graves of men he knew. Perhaps memory must begin with what we can bear to say.

But a traveler goes on. He hears in another city the name of the same battle, and the story begins somewhere else. He returns to the painting and sees that its edges are as carefully made as its center. Beyond them are men who fought there and are not shown, and years that came after the victory.

When I write of the Painted Stoa, I will write of what the Athenians placed upon its walls. I will also write down the names I can read beside the road. They have made room for both, though they do not tell the same story.