Images demonstrate unequivocally that by the middle of the seventh century BC the outline of the Trojan War, from the judgment of Paris to the Trojan horse and the sack of Troy, was known in many parts of the Greek world and beyond. Many episodes from that tradition appear on a variety of objects from the seventh century and early sixth century BC, mainly from the Peloponnese and the Aegean islands, while Athenian artisans seem to have had little interest in it until the 560s BC, after which Attic vases become our principal source of Trojan images. Most of the early images depict episodes we know from summaries of the poems of the Epic Cycle; very few of them refer to events from our Iliad and Odyssey.

To be comprehensible, most images of myth depend on prior knowledge of the event depicted, but from the images themselves it is rarely possible to determine precisely what the sources of that prior knowledge may have been. Archaic images can tell when and where a story was known but they cannot tell how it was known. Even when a text exists (e.g. Iliad), it is not possible to move confidently from an image to a text, much less so when all that survives are fragments of texts or summaries.

The question of whether or not an image reflects a specific text is primarily a modern one asked by students who are steeped in the textual traditions. The ancient viewers would obviously have known how they knew the stories behind the images, and on recognizing a scene, they would more likely have focused on its significance rather than on its source.

Given the small sample of archaic images that have come down to us, the fact that a story is not represented in surviving images does not necessarily tell us anything about the prevalence of that story. On the other hand, when a story is depicted, particularly when multiple examples exist, its appearance must indicate both the currency of the story in some form and the fact that it was significant for the artisans who created the images and usually for the patrons who obtained them.