"it was surprising to me how geographically widespread the hometowns of the characters were"<p>On the contrary, that was quite unsurprising, because the story describes a fight of two large alliances, and talks about the lords and rulers of these places. It doesn't talk about the local warriors e.g. Agamemnon was leading, but talks about the actual allies, the lords that joined each with their own armies.<p>In that time when Homer says "Lord-A and Lord-B and Lord-C participated" it's the equivalent of modern "Country-A and Country-B and Country-C participated". It's not like the story is describing a band of adventurers, the both sides commonly represent pretty much the whole military might of the surrounding region at the time, and since there's no centralization yet, each local "warband" is lead by their local "kings"/warlords/leaders/nobles, who are named in the story.<p>The colored areas of the map are not just a homeland of random representative characters, but the "countries" that actually fought in the war - you could say that it is "a way of making listeners from many areas feel connected to the story", or you could say that it is simply not omitting any participants; For example skipping Philoctetes from the list would pretty much mean saying that the land of Meliboea didn't participate in the war - it's like omitting New Zealand from the list of WW2 Allies, it would be far more serious than making people connected to the story, it would be considered offensive.