ABSTRACT
Apollodorus of Athens, one of the knowledgeable authorities on Greek mythology in the Hellenistic period, searched the remotest corners of Greek literature for significant myths that would highlight the characteristics of individual gods and heroes. The beginnings of Greek mythography go back to the genealogists and local historians of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Asclepiades of Tragilus, a pupil of Isocrates, compared the myths of Attic tragedy with earlier treatments. Conons corpus of fifty Stories ranks as the most interesting and at the same time the most neglected of the smaller mythographical collections. One approach was to collect relevant myths as background material for the explanation of major authors such as Homer, Pindar, the tragedians, and the Hellenistic poets. The introduction to the nature of Greek mythography is one that examines specific problems of authorship, dating, composition or source criticism that are typically encountered by those interested in a given mythographical work, a major mythographical component, a particular myth.
