Preface to Plato

“This book makes a major contribution…will offer the reader many hours of stimulating thought and a powerful challenge to reexamine some basic assumptions about the early Greek mind.”—Classical Bulletin

“A book bursting with new ideas, all of them exciting. It may well turn out to be a landmark in the study of Greek thought and literature.”—B. M. W. Knox

“The frontiers of several fields of research meet in this rich and germinal study. Professor Havelock is concerned with Greek epic poetry and Plato’s attack on it, with the whole of the Greek paideia as it existed before and after Plato, with the technological problems of communication, and, finally, with the emergence of Plato’s doctrine of ‘forms,’ in its total cultural setting… In brief, Havelock’s point is that Plato’s attack on poetry is integral to his philosophy as such if we see poetry as what it really was in his day… Havelock’s thesis is a sweeping one, and, on the whole, utterly convincing, tying in with the findings of an increasing number of recent psychological, historical, philosophical, and cultural studies.”—Walter J. Ong