Why is homer thought to have created rather than have to recorded Greek history?

Answer 1

Even Homer himself is very probably a 'creation', as there is not a shred of historical evidence on his existence and his name only first popped up hundreds of years after the creation of the Iliad.

As to the story itself: in the period when the Iliad supposedly played out, Greece's population still consisted of a number of small and fairly primitive communities led by councils of elders. At the time, only Crete had developed into a highly developed culture with Kings on top (the so-called Minoan Kingdom) but Crete doesn't even play a role in the Iliad. So, describing mighty Greek kings fighting a ten-year war on foreign soil back then really is 'creating' a glorious past. In reality, 'wars' in very ancient Greece were mostly sticks-and-stones affairs between two or three of those local communities.

Troy by the way has never even conclusively been proven to have actually existed. What we - and the tourist agencies - now call Troy is a place where seven consecutive cities have stood near the coast of northwestern Turkey. Only one was found to bear clear markings of destruction by fire but that was not the one where the gold 'treasures of Troy' were found by discoverer Heinrich Schliemann. That one burned city might easily have been burned down by natural causes: fire brigades were a thing of the future and all it took was a fire somewhere plus a strong wind at the time.