YDS 1998 Soru=38

According to the passage, the Homeric epics .

Nobody knows when fiction began. Maybe the first
storyteller was a prehistoric mother trying to explain
the world to her children. Or perhaps it was a hunter telling
about his adventures around the camp fire. Who can tell?
What we do know, though, is that storytelling was a purely
oral activity until around 800 BC. Myths and tales were
passed down by word of mouth and had to be memorized
by each new generation of storytellers. This oral tradition
only changed when ancient people started to keep written
records of certain stories. The earliest surviving examples
of these are the epics of Homer, a blind professional
storyteller, who lived in the eighth century BC.