Jack has some interesting insights into the Iliad. I agree completely with what she says about the similes. To my mind, the most striking example is in Book Twelve:

But they, as wasps quick-bending in the middle, or as bees
will make their homes at the side of the rocky way, and will not
abandon the hollow house they have made, but stand up to
men who come to destroy them....

One is drawn into the minute world of the wasps, a world as detailed as our own, with passions as great as our own. And then one's vision draws back, taking in the slaughter on the field of Troy, to realize that though these men die in as great numbers as the wasps, they are each men. Each man that falls in battle has a name, in the Iliad.

The Odyssey? Well, the title gives a hint as to who's important. But I think it's unfair to claim the Odyssey relatively safe. The stakes are different, not lower. The journeying of Odysseus, with its many ways, can easily go wrong, even in that world of metaphor, and although his life may not be hazard, his self is.