Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his poem Omeros a few years back. Omeros is a retelling of the Iliad in a new context.

Some people said: why have you, a black man from the caribbean, written a version of the Iliad instead of 'your' stories.

Walcott in a TV interview (wish I could find where he published this) said:   the Odyssey and the Iliad don't just belong to the modern Greeks, nor do they belong to the European and other scholars who've done all these studies on Ancient Greek. They belong to everyone who reads them, studies them, even learns the language.

Everyone may not agree; and of course the analogy between the Iliad and its ancient/dead traditional transmission and the folk music of the last two centuries is inexact. But I think it's a nice point about how these things can be shared and stay alive that way....Can you make it your own? The Iliad can withstand all manner of retellings. Are the ballads and traditional songs any less robust?