> A real city. A real war. A real text — composed four hundred years later, in Greek hexameter, by a poet or poets who had inherited the story without ever seeing the place — whose specifics turned out, in surprising number, to map.
The telling was only a fraction of the “epic cycle”, of which this is only a fragment which remains. There are other fragments which tell of Ephigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter who was human sacrificed for a good wind, as well as the story of the curse of the house of Atreas. Both of which explain the bad luck of Agamemnon’s home coming. Not to spoil that plot, you should just read the the plays of Aeschylus!
The current form of the Iliad is estimated to have been composed around the middle of the 8th century BC.
The destruction of Troy is estimated to have happened around the beginning of the 12th century BC.
Some passages of the Iliad may refer to stories inherited from earlier times of the Mycenaean Greeks, e.g. from the 14th century BC.
It is unlikely that anything in the Iliad can be traced to specific events that have happened 800 years earlier, i.e. in the 16th century BC, even if some of the kinds of poetic formulae employed by Homer are much older and they may have been inherited from the common Proto-Indo-European language.
The "horse" part of the siege tower idea was that the towers would be protected against fire etc. by horse hides.
Most of what we know of it appeared in non-Homeric stories and most famously (nowadays) in Virgil.
Its just poetic fiction in what is a long form poem.
With that said, it always in turn felt like the serpents' presence undermined Odysseus' claim of being clever, since from that perspective the Trojans didn't have much choice but to bring it in, or risk the ire of the gods. It's hardly a ruse if the enemy knows it's a trap but is compelled by supernatural forces to take it anyway.
That kind of thing happens all the time. Just sticking to the Trojan War, the original mythology has the Greeks unable to set sail because Artemis maintains unfavorable winds, because Agamemnon has offended her. She demands the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, before she will allow the Greeks to depart.
This sets up several other parts of the story. It's load-bearing. But to the classical Greeks, it's a slander against Artemis, and we can see the process of mythological revisionism working to adjust what happened.
But just reasoning 'rationally', I assume the argument is that the Iliad / Oddysey were told in cultures of predominantly oral tradition? So likely, just as with the game of telephone, the story got told and retold, and distorted, many times until someone ("Homer") decided to write it down?
So the argument being that Homer is not the 'creator' of the stories, and might just be someone who wrote it down?
Or perhaps the argument is that no single person wrote it down?
For instance I find very plausible the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by a man and the Odyssey was composed by a woman.
The main reason is the striking resemblance of the Iliad with an action movie, in contrast with the Odyssey that looks exactly like a chick flick.
More seriously, the Iliad focuses on a lot of things of great interest for the men of those times, like gory details about the best methods to kill or maim opponents in combat, or athletic competitions, while the Odyssey focuses on many things of interest for females, like clothes, food, gardens, romance, and it even has several passages that look quite feminist, despite being written millennia ago, by complaining about the discrimination unjustly enforced by men against women. The Odyssey also has a lot of strong female characters that are more important than the men, e.g. Calypso, Circe, Aurora, Nausicaa, Penelope.
The text of the Odyssey also contains evidence of being composed later than the Iliad, perhaps by several decades (due to some evolution of the language). So it has been hypothesized that the Odyssey was composed by a female relative of Homer, e.g. by his daughter or niece.
In any case, the author of the Odyssey mastered perfectly the same kind of language and poetic structures that were used in the Iliad, so he or she must have studied for many years the older poems in the same tradition, like the Iliad and the many others that have been lost.
A very large number of verses and short sequences of verses from the Iliad and the Odyssey are much older than the complete poems. However, someone, i.e. "Homer" alone, or with his assistants or relatives, had integrated all the older inherited poetic fragments into big coherent epic poems, before they were recorded in writing.
In the Odyssey, there is a lamentation about how the female goddess Eos = Aurora is strongly criticized for taking human lovers whenever she wants, while when the same thing is done by male gods, like Zeus = Jupiter, that is overlooked or even praised. Therefore this criticism about how promiscuity is treated differently by society for females and for males is millennia old.
You have a point that the Odyssey also mentions athletic competitions, not only the Iliad, but the importance and the amount of space dedicated to describing such events is much less than in the Iliad, where an entire chapter is dedicated for this and there are very detailed descriptions of the techniques used by each competitor.
In the Odyssey, the athletic competitions are just a vehicle used to highlight the physical abilities of Odysseus, demonstrating that even if he is older he can still easily outmatch younger competitors.
In the Iliad, the athletic competitions are described much like a radio or TV commentator would describe the events to spectators, focusing more on the description of the actions of the competitors as a show of skill, than on the results.