Echoes Of Troy And Carthage

I found a parallel between these two passages:

"The Midwest of his boyhood, before he went off to war in 1942, was like a dream, a world forever lost, already one with Troy and Carthage and the innocence of the Inuit. He had learned better than to return."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART FOUR, 1990 A.D., p. 178.

"The book was more than a personal souvenir: it was the symbol of a world that had been swallowed in the immensity of time - a world that was now as legendary as Atlantis, Carthage, Troy. A world that seemed now to belong to humanity's carefree childhood, to an age when only alchemists would dream of transmuting lead into gold ... A dawn world ..."
-Edmund Cooper, Seed Of Light (London, 1979), Part One, Chapter One, p. 22.

Troy, Carthage and Atlantis were destroyed and no longer exist. Poul Anderson wrote about Atlantis and Carthaginians. Paul and Karen Anderson also wrote about lost Ys. See:

Nostalgia For Ys
A History Of Ys
Legendary Stories

Both Anderson and Cooper linked nostalgia for childhood to vicarious nostalgia for times much longer ago. See also remarks about the phrase, "...long ago...," here.