It is extremely doubtful that Homer wrote anything, he was a "Bard", a singer of folk tales whose job it was to entertain the palace banquets with stories of Greece's illustrious past. It is now commonly recognised that he composed the Illiad and the Odyssey in the second half of the eighth century to be performed in their entirety at bardic festivals held three or four times a year throughout the greek islands (Homer was probably born in Smyrna or Chios) read by a succession of bards with Homer himself at the major festivals. The first true style of literary writing emerged during that century when the Greeks took over the Phonician style of writing which allowed a flow of text rather than the purely accounting tablet writing previously used. This allowed scribes to write down the words of many bardic compositions, the Illiad and the Odyssey being the best known and the best preserved. Rather like a comedy popsong or nursery rhyme of today, the audience would recognise phrases, sentences and even complete verses and join in with gusto at appropriate moments.