The Iliad is a masterpiece in a lot of ways. My first reading in high school (back when we read that sort of thing in high school) led me to believe that it was a case of the winners writing the history; later readings convinced me that that was only partially true, for in the Iliad the Greeks aren't the good guys, at least not by the standards of later Greek morality. They are presented as violent, vengeful, squabbling, barbaric, and generally with a sense of honor mitigated strongly by vanity. Consider the real beef of Achilles with his king - it was over the possession of a slave girl. He pouted, Patroclus borrowed his armor and went to his death at the hands of the Trojan hero Hector, who was by our own lights today and that of the Greeks of the fifth century B.C., a far more civilized individual than Achilles: a family man whose relations with wife and son are among the most tender passages in the Iliad, whose death at Achilles' hands causes the latter to change into something better. The scene of the Trojan king Priam humbling himself before Achilles to beg for the recovery of his beloved son's body is central to the development of the character. It would have been very much in character for the prior Achilles to haughtily refuse; instead, he relents, agrees, and becomes a finished man. The fall of Troy (no, the silly Trojan Horse is NOT in the Iliad) is presented in tragic language, not in triumph, as Hector's bride throws their son from the walls and goes off to her own enslavement.
This is brilliant, subtle, complex stuff, far from a chest-thumping campfire recitation it may resemble and is often accused of being. The victors (or putative victors) of the literature may have written it, but not with themselves as irreproachable heroes.
This approach also posits a year of 1178-1177 B.C.