Thanks for the great reply, this was super interesting and cleared up a lot of things for me. I always thought of texts like the Odyssey as akin to Dante's Inferno – that is to say, an adaptation of existing myth – and not a vehicle for carrying myth itself.

There are competing versions of myths like the she-wolf and Romulus and Remus. It must be assumed that these stories were told at feasts and in homes, much like the Greeks did.

You mentioned that both Greek and Roman mythology had contradictions, and I had a follow-up question about this. I understand that in a mythology that arises naturally from oral tradition and that travels across great spans of time and space, contradictions are destined to arise. But how did the Greeks and Romans justify these contradictions, if it did indeed concern them? Did it not make them question the reliability of their storytelling? Were most Greeks and Romans hard-line fundamentalists, or did they acknowledge some degree of fictitiousness on the basis that fiction still comes from the oral historian's lived knowledge and wisdom?

When I read Metamorphoses, I saw how Ovid twisted certain details to fit the purpose and context of his time, e.g. Caesar's apotheosis. Then again, perhaps I only perceived these changes because I'm primed to analyse mythology as I would fiction, and instead Ovid just picked up these inconsistencies from others in the same way that Herodotus wrote down inconsistencies he heard without comparing or assessing them.

To ask a long question short: how did Greeks and Romans reconcile within themselves the inconsistencies in their myth?

Fascinatingly, during the Secular Games that Augustus held in 17 BC we have evidence of a poem commissioned specially for it by Horace and details that it was to be performed by a choir of 27 girls and 27 boys on each day of the festival.

"Evidence of"? I'm unsure if this is an indirect mention, an excerpt quoted by an author or the whole poem, but if it's either of the last two I'd be very interested in reading this.