Mythology is like a large tapestry

Greek mythology has gradations of credibility. For instance, the myths about the Trojan War are not historically factual, though a city called Troy (Ilium) existed and a war is believed to have taken place at its location. It was regarded as a purely legendary city until Heinrich Schliemann identified the mound of Hissarlik on the northeast Aegean coast of Turkey as the site of Troy. The city was apparently sacked and destroyed by fire in the mid 13th century BCE, a period coinciding with the Mycenaean civilization of Greece (Bronze Age of Greece).

• Mycenaean Age (1500-1200 BCE)
• Dark Age of Greece (1100-750 BCE)
• Archaic Age of Greece (700-500 BCE)
• Classical Age of Greece (490-323 BCE) Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes
• Hellenistic Age (323-31 BCE) from the death of Alexander the Great, who conquered all of Greece and much of the Middle East, to the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra by Octavian. (this is when Greek culture flourishes through the Mediterranean, Near East and Asia)

We study these myths because they are not completely true and neither are they completely false. This is the paradox of myth. We draw our analysis of myth from a total system, Greek Mythology, which incorporates every broken shard of pottery and burnt piece of papyrus.

In The Uses of Greek Mythology, Ken Dowden writes:

In fact Greek Mythology is a shared fund of motifs and ideas ordered into a shared repertoire of stories. These stories link with, compare and contrast with, and are understood in the light of, other stories in the system. Greek Mythology is an ‘intertext,’ because it is constituted by all the representations of myth ever experienced by its audience and because every new representation gains its sense from how it is positioned in relation to this totality of previous presentations.