I've always heard people say that the only reason we still have the Odyssey and the Iliad is because the Arab Caliphate kept translations of them after Western Rome collapsed. I've heard this from a lot of people, but is it true that they were the only reason? Did the Eastern Roman Empire not keep records of those books?
No, not even a little bit. For on thing, if we only know of Homer from translation (and Latin translations did exist in the Middle Ages as well), how would we have the Greek, which is extensively studied and very much in existence? While translations into Arabic and then into Latin were instrumental in the rediscovery of some authors in the Latin-speaking west (especially Aristotle), they did not affect Homer. Even in most cases where Arabic texts preserved for the Latin west (where knowledge of Greek was lost) Greek texts, the actual Greek was usually rediscovered from Byzantine copies later. This is certainly not the case with Homer, however. Homeric manuscripts are among our most prolific Greek manuscripts--I think only the New Testament survives in more copies. There are around a thousand Homeric manuscripts, several hundred of which are ancient papyri (a very unusually high proportion). Homer was lost in the west, except in some translations and summaries in Latin, resulting in the elevation of Virgil rather than Homer as the poet of the Trojan conflict, but he was never lost in the Greek speaking east. Byzantine scholars never stopped copying and studying Homer--apart from the tremendous number of manuscripts, the Byzantine scholars also preserved and produced an enormous number of scholia and commentaries that survive. In fact, there are so many Greek copies of Homer that it's actually difficult to trace the manuscript tradition, i.e. which exemplar a family of manuscripts was copied from, a very unusual problem in the study of textual transmission, where sometimes entire authors are preserved only from a single manuscript transmission.