Homer was not one person. It's probably an archetype representing several (or many) ancient Greek bards singing heroic epics from village to village for several centuries, until it was written down. The interesting part about the writing down is was that it was a well paid, large scale, effort sponsored by the city state of Athens. A sort of highly important, and well funded, state propaganda of the time. So, if it were for people working for the sole motive of good writing, we wouldn't even know that these epics existed, since they would have been long forgotten, just as many other oral folk epics around the world.