Perhaps The Iliad and The Odyssey Commemorate a Loss Rather than a Victory.
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
National epics often commemorate losses, not victories. The Song of Roland, The Song of Igor, Arthurian legends, El Cid. In recent times, this trend is echoed in The Star-Spangled Banner (written after the British sacked Washington DC in the War of 1812), the tales of the fall of the Alamo, and Civil War books like Gone with the Wind.
Perhaps that was the case with The Iliad and The Odyssey as well.
We know that between 1100 and 800 BCE Greece had waves of migration and invasion by unknown people from the east and north. Perhaps Troy was overwhelmed by such a migration/invasion. Perhaps the invaders took the entire coast, from Troy southward, and eventually took the Aegean islands and mainland Greece as well. Ithaca, to the west of Greece, may have been the last holdout.
Bards told tales which reversed the outcome, as if Greeks had conquered Troy. Such tales raised a sense of national pride among the defeated. The stories they told were not history. Rather they were fictitious compensation for loss. Hence the importance and durability of those tales.
Rather than stir up thoughts of rebellion and revenge (like Remember the Alamo), these stories emphasized the role of fate and the gods, fostered pride in the legendary feats of forefathers, and ended (in The Odyssey) with god-sponsored reconciliation and peace.
