Studies of early mythography have stressed the dependent relationship between the so-called logographers and epic archaic poetry. Better knowledge of archaic and classical mythography in recent years has provided more accurate details of the context of the production and purposes of the fragmentary works by Hecataeus, Acusilaus, Pherecydes and Hellanicus. Each of them has his own agenda and programme, which have to be explained within their context and not, from a purely historic-literary perspective, as an appendix, a continuation or an exegesis of the epic tradition. This article argues that conditions of preservation, and means of transmission, of fragmentary mythographers have shaped the way we approach them. In other words, the process of reception of epic poetry through the exegetic and grammarian tradition distorts our view and leads the modern reader to see mythography as being dependent on Homer or Hesiod.

This article introduces a new analytical framework, ‘mythographic topography’. This approach recognizes the materiality of mythographic writing as preserved by the manuscript tradition and the significance of the spatial dynamics it produces. Mythographic topography encompasses both the formal properties of textual organization and how these shape the reader’s imaginative experience of space and narrative. As an analytical framework, it involves interrogating a text according to three categories (each an ancient meaning of topos): its arrangement of textual passages, its use of space and its activation of narrative tropes. Using the Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis as a case study, we demonstrate how this text requires the reader to consider issues of order, disorder and reordering within a culturally familiar narrative paradigm.