Did you see the news about the recent discovery of a 3,000-year-old tomb on the Greek island of Lefkada? The tomb, though quite small, is configured like the massive Mycenaean "beehive" tombs, more often found on the Greek mainland and on the island of Crete. What makes this discovery so interesting is that beehive tombs are associated with the Homeric era (ca. 1100 BCE), and Lefkada, in the Ionian Sea, has been considered to be the home of the great Greek hero Odysseus.

How purely delightful.

Every time we think all the great discoveries must surely be behind us, a construction worker blunders on Kennewick Man (July 1996) or a shepherd boy happens upon the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947) or an archaeologist taking just one more look finds King Tutankhamen's fabulous treasury (1922) in Egypt.

If all the buried treasures in the world popped through the surface of the earth like bean sprouts in the spring, there wouldn't be enough storage space in all the Quonsets ever built to display them. Great discoveries are yet to come. The Lefkada tomb, in its own modest way, may be one of them.

For lovers of the Greek classics, the discovery in March 2008 of a Homeric-era tomb at or near where Odysseus is said to have lived is roughly equivalent to unearthing traces of what might just be Noah's ark at Mt. Ararat, or stumbling upon a pillar of salt that might, in a squint, be said to look a little like Lot's wife.

It used to be said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato and all literature a footnote to Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey are no longer regarded as the oldest poems in the world, but nobody denies that they are amongst the oldest surviving major poems in the western literary tradition. What's even more remarkable is that they are still - after millennia - considered two of the greatest works of literature ever created. Moby Dick? Citizen Kane? Abbey Road? Only time will tell.

Back in Jefferson's day, it was thought that the Iliad and the Odyssey were immensely long fictional pastiches that had been cobbled together from short episodic poems (lays) by late compilers. The literary critics of the Enlightenment ruled out the possibility that the events described in the Homeric epics ever occurred.

They were too hasty.

A series of archaeological and linguistic discoveries in the 19th and 20th centuries revolutionized our understanding of Homer.

From an early age, the German businessman and autodidact Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) was convinced that the Trojan story was truth, not fiction. After amassing a private fortune and retiring from business pursuits by the age of 41, Schliemann decided to prove the truth of the Homeric epics - with a shovel.

Almost alone among lovers of Homer, Schliemann believed that ancient Troy actually existed, that it was indeed sacked by a Greek army around 1100 BCE, and that it could be found exactly where Homer located it in the Iliad. Serious scholars sneered. But in 1871, at Hissarlik in Turkey, where a narrow body of water connects the Aegean and the Black Sea, Schliemann unearthed Troy. Although his methods were crude, he managed to convince the world that he had, in fact, found the site of Homer's great war epic.

In 1876, at the time when the United States was celebrating its centennial (a whopping 100 years!), Schliemann excavated a 3,000-year-old site in southern Greece, which he believed to be the home of the Homeric warlord Agamemnon. Once again, one gifted amateur's Homeric fundamentalism trumped legions of scholarly skeptics. Schliemann unearthed what he called the "Treasury of Atreus," a fabulous collection of mostly gold funeral objects. The gold "Mask of Agamemnon," although it is almost certainly not an actual likeness of the Greek commander at Troy, is one of the world's greatest archaeological treasures. The moment he unearthed it, Schliemann, with his characteristic flare for drama, sent a famous telegram to the King of Greece. "Today," he wrote, "I have looked upon the face of Agamemnon."

Soon, philology came to the aid of archaeology.

In the 1950s, a mysterious ancient Greek writing system known as Linear B was deciphered by a British bank clerk named Michael Ventris. Linear B proved to be a Mycenaean script. (The Greek alphabet had not yet been invented). It soon became clear that Linear B was similar to the language of the Mycenaean world described in the Homeric epics. Using Linear B, British scholars even argued that the famous "Catalogue of Ships" in Book Two of the Iliad was based on historically-verifiable near-Eastern Greek and "Trojan" tribal names and locations. In other words, the Homeric epics were at least partly based on historical fact.

Most Homer scholars today believe that sometime between 2000 and 1000 BCE, a clash of civilizations occurred at the site of Schliemann's Troy, and that the Iliad and Odyssey in some distant way record (and no doubt exaggerate) an historical event. And though the Odyssey is clearly more fanciful than the Iliad, and it contains elements that undeniably belong to the folk tale tradition, many scholars believe that somewhere at its core it may be based on the delayed homecoming of an actual Greek veteran of the Trojan War. Note: If I were 10 years late coming home from the war and had to explain my wanderings to my long-suffering wife, I might invent a few folk-tale whoppers, myself.

The Iliad and Odyssey are among my very favorite works of literature. Several years ago I had the great good fortune to visit the site of Troy. My adventuresome mother was with me. And to fulfill a youthful vow, I ran three times around the ruined walls of Troy, in the manner, actually, in the footsteps, of Homer's Greek marauder Achilles, who chased Troy's hero Hector "thrice fugitive around Troy wall." Though I hefted nothing but a digital camera, I was exhausted after my run, and I could not have lifted a Pelean ash spear if my life depended upon it.

Who knows what scholars will finally conclude about the shaft grave on Lefkada? It almost certainly did not once contain Odysseus, the "man who was never at a loss," but it certainly was the final resting place of an Odysseus-like prominent man of the Homeric era. That in itself awakens wonder and what John Keats, in a poem about reading Homer, called "wild surmise."

The world is more magical than we like to admit. There is, even in this jaded age, reason to awaken again to a sense of wonder.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@aol.com.)