What's interesting is how he links up all these stories that have never actually been put together in this way. It's true: the story of the Trojan war is more properly called a genre than a story. The Iliad takes place somewhere near the end of it, for instance. THE TROJAN WOMEN and AGAMENON are after. And so on. It's all separate stories and fragments and traditions. Shanower is the first to try to tell it as one big macro-story.
But not as mythology, though it is, really, but a social one: it's the story the later Greeks told to explain how their civilization had come to be. The people who I mean are the ones we think of when we think of "the Greeks" as in the scientists and Spartans(the ones in 300 are the later ones--"Sparta" as we understand it wasn't the same in Helen's time) and philosophers. This isn't those Greeks. The Mycaeneans were, to the Greeks, a lost civilization that preceded the Dark Age caused by the Dorian invasions (we don't really even understand the Mycaenean language)--these to them were what Robin Hood or King Arthur is to us.
But without reference to the gods! Except in that the characters consider them real. But at no point are we given an objective representation of gods, rather characters perceiving an event as god-driven, like a storm. Which takes the mickey out of people saying films like TROY were weakened by removing the ILIAD's reference to the gods. No, it was just a crap movie, that's all, and that was the least of its problems.