OK but Emily Wilson, the Odyssey and Iliad are, actually, textually, about the Achaeans breaking so many social norms in the pursuit of glory and plunder that their own society self-destructs. The Trojan War is kicked off by Agamemnon choosing to sacrifice Iphigeneia/Iphianassa instead of making a stable alliance by marrying her to Achilles, and everything that follows, climaxing in the total implosion of the Mycenean royal family and Agamemnon's own murder, is a reflection of that choice. The fall of the House of Atreus shows up in the first handful of lines. For an ancient Greek audience, this was the mythohistorical explanation for the end of the age of heroes, and was, yes, probably a contemporary way to metabolize the civil wars and societal breakdown of the Bronze Age Collapse, one that endured after the Greeks no longer remembered that the Bronze Age civilizations had existed.
Without even getting into secondary or later classics like Hesiod, Virgil, or the Attic tragedies this stuff is all over the original Homer: the Achaeans constantly desecrating temples and priestesses, desecrating corpses, butchering babies, and then being cursed by the gods to have their own families and cities crumble under the violence they bring home from Troy. I'm shocked that a prominent classics scholar thinks that Homer was endorsing all of this in pursuit of glory?
