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Preface to Plato
Preface to Plato
Preface to Plato is the foundational statement of the orality-literacy thesis for Greek antiquity. Across eleven chapters, Havelock reconstructs the conditions under which the archaic Greek mind stored its inherited knowledge — in Homeric hexameter, performed, memorized, and transmitted through ritualized recitation — and argues that Plato’s attack on the poets in Republic II–III and X is the founding gesture of a different kind of consciousness.
The book’s central move is to read Homer not as literature but as tribal encyclopedia. The Catalogue of Ships, the genealogies, the embedded ethical and ritual directives: all are the oral culture’s means of preserving what a literate culture preserves in writing. The patron of this arrangement is mnemosyne, understood as a collective rather than private faculty. The “formulaic state of mind” in which the whole community is held by the epic performance is what Plato sets out to break.
Havelock reads Plato’s division of the soul and the curriculum of the Republic as a program for producing a psyche capable of standing apart from its mimetic content — a psyche whose supreme arete is thinking, whose object is “number and calculation” rather than the performed deeds of the ancestors. The psyche is the child of this program; the alphabet is its material precondition.