The first 45 have a common format: a brief statement of a wonder tale from Greek mythology, usually followed by a claim of disbelief ("This is absurd" or "This is not likely" or "The true version is..."), and then a sequence of every-day occurrences which gave rise to the wonder-story through misunderstanding.
So there must be some probable series of events behind all myth; but the "poets and early historians" made them into wonderful tales to amaze their audience.
Jacob Stern distinguishes this from the more wide-ranging rationalism of Euhemerus: Palaephatus retains Callisto and Actaeon as historic human beings; rationalism extended to the gods can make them deified human beings or personifications of natural forces or of the passions, but does not leave them gods.
[3] Palaephatus uses four principal devices for explaining the wonders of myth, and a number of minor devices: Palaephatus is a very rare name, and many scholars have concluded that it is a pseudonym; as an adjective in epic poetry, it meant of ancient fame; it could also mean speaker of old tales.
The time at which he lived is uncertain, but he appears to have been usually placed after Phemonoe, though some writers assigned him even an earlier date.
Palaephatus of Abydos, an historian who lived in the time of Alexander the Great, and is stated to have been loved (παιδικά) by the philosopher Aristotle, for which the Suda[4] quotes the authority of Philo, Peri paradoxou historias, and of Theodorus of Ilium, Troica, Book 2.
Jacob Stern, the modern editor, concludes from this, and the missing references, that Palaephatus was originally in five books, and was condensed down to one sometime before the publication of the Suda, although a fuller copy survived so Eustathius could see it in the twelfth century.
There are a dozen manuscripts of the present text, differing in length and in order, dating from the thirteenth through sixteenth century.
How much of it derives from Palaephatus himself is open to question, although there is general agreement that the seven chapters of straight unrationalized mythology at the end are not.