I get a charge out of the academics/non-academics that take Homer's accounts as fact but will in the same breath deny the historicity of Biblical accounts.
The difference? Homer's accounts don't make claims on their life and the afterlife.
I know what you mean. Unthinking, uncritical doubt of Homer was common in the 19th c academic community. Schliemann defeated it for a while, but at least in the English-speaking world, Evans' excavation of Knossos and subsequent fantasies about the Minoans (helped along by colonial period nationalism) led back toward doubt and discredit of the late Schliemann's work. There is still quite a few who will proclaim that whatever the germ of the story may have been, Homer's Trojan War per se never happened.
Homer's Odysseus however does visit the underworld, which illustrates the view of the afterlife common to his (her?) time and place.