Discuss why Homer used everyday detail of Greek life to enhance his tale and give it a familiar feel for his readers.

Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey, is concerned with the grand adventures of one of the great legendary heroes of ancient Greece. These adventures involve other great heroes, as well as gods and monsters, mythical places, and impossible situations. Under the veneer of fantasy, the Odyssey grapples with the serious themes of love, loyalty, deference to the gods, and endurance in the face of hardship.
Homer grounds the fantastical and philosophical elements of his story in the context of ordinary life. People eat bread and meat, drink wine, wear shoes, wash their hands before each meal, sleep in beds, sit on chairs. Some are wealthy and others are poor; some are young and others are old. They laugh, weep, argue, threaten, tease, accuse, mourn, and jostle together just like people have always done. The gods themselves appear in human form, have disagreements, and make deals with each other.
Odysseus has many encounters with the mythical on his long journey home, but his reactions in each case are completely relatable: he is angry, he is frightened, he is hungry, and he is exhausted. The events of his journey are often supernatural, but he himself is not superhuman. He claws his way back to Ithaka despite seemingly endless setbacks for that most recognizable of human motivations: the desire to go home. Home is not a fairy-tale palace, but a small, rocky island that houses his wife of twenty years and the son he left as a baby. Odysseus is a hero, but he is also an ordinary man with ordinary wants and needs.
Homer's use of everyday details includes metaphors to compare mythical situations with real ones which his audience would understand. When Menalaos is discussing his encounter with Proteus, he says that the god herds seals:

He goes amid the seals to check their number,and when he sees them all, and counts them all,he lies down like a shepherd with his flock.

As Odysseus sails on his raft from Kalypso's island, a storm nearly drowns him until a nymph takes pity on him. Homer describes her movements like those of a sea-bird:

After she had bestowed her veil, the nereiddove like a gull to windwardwhere a dark waveside closed over her whiteness.

The imagery Homer employs is vivid and refers directly to the world his audience inhabits. By constructing the world of Odysseus with the same food, buildings, clothing, landscapes, rituals, and emotions that the audience knows, Homer "retrieves" Odysseus from the heights of legend and brings him down to eye level, where the audience can identify with him. The questions that the Odyssey raises about love, loyalty, and so forth become questions for the audience as well. What would they have done, or thought, or felt, in Odysseus's position? In Telemakhos's? In Penelope's? Homer has so skillfully woven the myth into reality that these intangible figures and the context through which they move become vital, recognizable, and relevant—not just to the audiences of his own time but to the modern day as well.