Eric Havelock - who was a visiting scholar at University of Toronto - brought together Rhys Carpenter's evidence for the late introduction of the alphabet, Milman Parry's findings on oral-formulaic patterns, and Plato's pronouncements on the nature of epic poetry, to support his theory concerning the impact of the alphabet on Greek culture and education. 

Following Carpenter, Havelock pointed out that early Greek culture was "wholly oral" and after the invention of the alphabet, there was "a long period of resistance to the use of letters," so that literacy was not achieved in Athens until nearly three hundred years later.^[1]  Greek "society became literate only by slow degrees" (1986: 29).  Oral habits of communication and instruction "persisted long after the alphabet had theoretically made a reading culture possible" (1963: 45-46).  Between Homer and Plato, argued Havelock, the method of preserving the culture began to change as Greek education became alphabetized.  Even up to Plato's time, he said, the introduction of the alphabet made "little practical difference to the educational system or to the intellectual life of adults" (1963: 38).   Since Plato's writings are prose dialogues and not works of epic poetry, Havelock placed "Plato near the end of the great transition from oral to literate habits of communication" (1963: 97).  Plato describes a cultural situation "in which oral communication still dominates all the important relationships and valid transactions of life."   He concluded that "it is only too likely that Plato is describing a situation which was on the way to being changed as he wrote" (1963: 41).

Havelock applied Parry's findings concerning the oral verse of Homer to problems in our reconstruction of the history of early Greek education.  He sought to demonstrate that the "formulaic technique was employed as the instrument of education" by the pre-literate Greeks (1963: 123).  He asked, "How did this civilization preserve its laws, traditions, historical sense and its technical skills?"  He pointed out that preservation and transmission of the tradition can never rely completely on the "give and take" between generations.  To function, a social group needs some kind of "standardized linguistic statement" that describes and enforces a common consciousness, shared habit patterns and collective values.  In an oral society, this statement is preserved in the memories of living people and passed down through the generations.  The collective memory provides the content of the "educational apparatus" of the group.  To become available for "transmission through the educational apparatus, the tradition has to be verbally preserved in permanent and unaltered form . . ." (1963: 290-91).  People had to be "assisted in their memorization of the living word by every possible mnemonic device which could print this word indelibly upon the consciousness."  How can memory retain elaborate linguistic statements without changing them in transmission from one person to another and from one generation to the next?  According to Havelock, "the only possible verbal technology available . . . was that of the rhythmic word organized in verbal and metrical patterns which were unique enough to retain their shape" (1963: 42-43).  Poetry functioned as a technology for preserving cultural identity.  It was used by the Greeks as form of education, he asserted, "as a way of preserving and transmitting the accumulated body of knowledge in the absence of writing."  Homeric verse was therefore central to Greek education prior to Plato

not on the grounds that we would offer, namely poetry's inspirational and imaginative effects, but on the ground that it provided a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment (1963: 27).

According to Havelock, poetry did not mean the same thing for the Greeks that it means to us.  Greek oral poetry was a kind of  "tribal encyclopedia," an "indoctrination which today would be comprised in a shelf of text books and works of reference."  Poetry was the "container" for all philosophy, history and science.  It was "first and last a didactic instrument for transmitting the tradition" (1963: 43).

Havelock asserted that poetry was the "sole mechanism" for memorization and preservation in the absence of written record.  It served this function via three devices: first, the employment of rhythms and formulas to aid in the recall and re-use of the cultural record (1963: 100), second, through the use of what he called "verbal formulas;" and third, through the reduction of all experience to a great story or a connected series of stories.  Poetic rhythm involves consistent repetition of patterns of language sounds.  Verbal formulas - what Parry and Lord called types and themes - entail the repetition of  "an identical order" in different passages (1963: 82-84).  The third device, that of the great story, involves gathering together a number of small stories into a coherent series of episodes focussed around "several prominent agents" who "act and speak with some overall consistency" (1963: 175-76).  Episodes provide a "frame of reference, the chapter headings, the library catalogue, within which the memory can find markers"  by locating a narrative situation in the context of a huge and compendious story.  In this way, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are kinds of catalogues of the history and the geography of the Greeks.  Hesiod's Theogony classifies the gods, their functions and families, while the Works and Days is a catalogue of "exhortations, parables, proverbs, aphorisms, sayings, wise saws and instances, interlarded with stories" (1963: 295).

Havelock linked Parry's findings on the imitative nature of the formulaic patterns of Homeric poetry with Plato's criticism of the poets in the Republic, and with the negative assessment of art in other dialogues.  He pointed out that Plato was claiming for himself the place he was asking the poets to vacate.  With the ascendance of literacy, he argued, more and more of the cultural heritage was set down in writing, and the ways of the old tradition were challenged.  Plato=s attack on the poets was, according to Havelock, a rejection of the oral tradition in which the bards merely imitated and copied words and phrases without any genuine knowledge of what they were doing.  Plato's assault, he maintained, was a rejection of the formulaic style produced by the Greek oral mentality, a state of mind that was in tension with new modes of thought made possible by the effects of the alphabet. 

According to Havelock, the transition from oral to literate patterns touched off changes in vocabulary, syntax, and in the basic categories of human thought.  The terminology used by Plato and Aristotle to define and categorize the operations of consciousness, he argued, had to pass through a long period of development (1963: xi).  He cited the findings of Harold Cherniss to support his theory that "the metaphysical interpretations of pre-Platonic thinkers which are found in Aristotle's own works are in large measure accommodated to the problems and indeed the terminology of his own system."^[2]  He presented passages in the Republic (522a-530b) as evidence that Plato was creating a new frame of discourse and a new kind of vocabulary.  Plato, he claimed, was arguing for an approach that focused not on "modeling and reproducing."  He was "demanding instead a discourse which shall rearrange phenomena under general headings or categories" (1963: 259-60).  The language of categories and universals, claimed Havelock, refers to what would be called "concept" in modern terminology.  He said that Plato avoided the notion of concept or mental construction that would make things like justice and goodness "abstract, arbitrary and relative conceptions of the human intellect."  Instead, he argued, Plato saw them as "somehow representing the cosmic structure independent of human cognition and so labeled them visual shapes or forms."  Thus, in the development of human thought, the theory of forms was a transition between the "image-thinking" of oral poetry and the abstract concepts of philosophy made possible by writing.