When Homer was composing, the Mycenaean world was long gone.

The palaces had been destroyed for centuries.

The Linear B writing system in which the Mycenaean world was documented had been forgotten.

But oral tradition preserved fragments of the world that had been, transmitted through generations of bards who kept the memories alive even as the cultural context that gave them original meaning was lost.

The Odyssey’s final books, in which Odysseus returns home and slaughters the suitors who have usurped his place, can be read as a kind of homecoming myth for a displaced people — the fantasy of return for communities that had been scattered by the collapse.

Whether this is what Homer intended, or whether it is an over-reading of later meaning into a poem about adventure and heroism, is a matter for literary scholars.