For a long time they were discounted. But that was before the rich guy with the bee in his bonet funded the dig that discovered the ruins of Troy - the first of several successes using the technique of analyzing legends and seeing what sites in the real world might match.
Just because Heinrich Schliemann found a city where he thought Homer said Troy was located (the topographical indications in the Iliad aren't all that precise) doesn't mean that everything in Homer's poems is true. All it means is that there was a city in the area where the poems indicated there might be a city. The excavations haven't turned up any solid evidence that the Trojan War happened. There isn't a consensus on who inhabited the city during the Bronze Age or what language they spoke, so we don't even know what they called the city we call Troy.
Most classical archaeologists who bother to think about Atlantis at all connect it with Thera, a volcanic island in the Aegean Sea, where there was a major eruption sometime during the middle of the second millenium BC. This eruption might have something to do with the decline of several Mediterranean civilizations around the same time. Most archaeologists, though, think the Atlantis thing is a waste of time, unless they're trying to get funding from rich donors.
The vast majority of Greek literature that's translated into English is translated directly from Greek texts. Greek civilization had an active tradition of manuscript copying long after its supposed decline. Many of the texts we have today of famous literary authors (playwrights like Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, lyric poets like Pindar, etc.) derive from editions put together for use in schools during the Byzantine empire in the 9th-11th centuries AD.
Greek wasn't widely known in Latin-speaking western Europe at this point, but there was close contact between western Europe and the Islamic world, since the Arabs controlled Spain and Sicily. Because of this western scholars had better access to Arabic translations of Greek medical and scientific literature than they had to the Greek originals.
The translations stimulated interest in the orignals, though: in the 13th century, the great popularizer of Aristotle in the west, St. Thomas Aquinas, has Greek manuscripts of Aristotle and translates him into Latin. As another poster points out, Archimedes was translated from Greek into Latin by the archbishop of Corinth during the same period, though the manuscript was subsequently lost. When the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, many Greek scholars decided it might be time to move to Italy. They brought a lot of Greek manuscripts with them, and knowledge of Greek language and literature became widespread (which was probably a factor in the Renaissance). By the end of the 15th century printed editions of Greek texts start being widely disseminated, and in the following centuries Greek becomes an essential component of higher education.
There is a very small amount of ancient Greek works known only from translations in other languages. But as for Archimedes, many of his works have been available in Greek since the Middle Ages; as far as I know only three books survive in Arabic only. The Hippocratic Corpus (not all written by "Hippocrates") survives in many Greek manuscripts, as well as translations in Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic. The amount of ancient Greek works that exists in Arabic only is probably very, very small; I'd say that 99.9% of the Greek material we have is preserved in Greek.
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Most classical archaeologists who bother to think about Atlantis at all connect it with Thera, a volcanic island in the Aegean Sea, where there was a major eruption sometime during the middle of the second millenium BC. This eruption might have something to do with the decline of several Mediterranean civilizations around the same time. Most archaeologists, though, think the Atlantis thing is a waste of time, unless they're trying to get funding from rich donors.
Greek wasn't widely known in Latin-speaking western Europe at this point, but there was close contact between western Europe and the Islamic world, since the Arabs controlled Spain and Sicily. Because of this western scholars had better access to Arabic translations of Greek medical and scientific literature than they had to the Greek originals.
The translations stimulated interest in the orignals, though: in the 13th century, the great popularizer of Aristotle in the west, St. Thomas Aquinas, has Greek manuscripts of Aristotle and translates him into Latin. As another poster points out, Archimedes was translated from Greek into Latin by the archbishop of Corinth during the same period, though the manuscript was subsequently lost. When the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, many Greek scholars decided it might be time to move to Italy. They brought a lot of Greek manuscripts with them, and knowledge of Greek language and literature became widespread (which was probably a factor in the Renaissance). By the end of the 15th century printed editions of Greek texts start being widely disseminated, and in the following centuries Greek becomes an essential component of higher education.
There is a very small amount of ancient Greek works known only from translations in other languages. But as for Archimedes, many of his works have been available in Greek since the Middle Ages; as far as I know only three books survive in Arabic only. The Hippocratic Corpus (not all written by "Hippocrates") survives in many Greek manuscripts, as well as translations in Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic. The amount of ancient Greek works that exists in Arabic only is probably very, very small; I'd say that 99.9% of the Greek material we have is preserved in Greek.