I think we’re too quick to dismiss myth as pure fiction. These things have a root somewhere.
After Schliemann, there was an apparently organized campaign to undermine the whole idea of the veracity of surviving ancient texts. The most notorious example (besides the construction of the Egyptian pseudochronology, which is mostly earlier in date) may be the jokers who claimed that there was never any flowing water, no cracks in the ground etc inside the Temple of the Delphic Oracle.
After more than a century of generations just believing that concoction, a geologist finally surveyed the site and found not only one fault line, but two — intersecting at the point where the oracle used to sit. Another researcher who had been brought up to reject the texts got talked into taking a look (the geologist basically told him, you haven’t been there, and you don’t know what you’re talking about), and then got permission to take some samples. A hallucinogenic gas (that’s one of its characeristics anyway) used to bubble out with the water (y’know, the water that someone claimed wasn’t there; the spring dried up in ancient times), and that’s what made the pythoness babble.