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.

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