Abstract

In this fascinating but mildly repetitious book, Havelock suggests that Homeric Greece was characterized by an oral culture in which the standards, history and techniques of the society were preserved and transmitted through a continuous process of memorization, repetition and recall. The material preserved was necessarily embodied in visualized particular acts and events within the narrative context of the epic. Havelock maintains that Plato's attack on the poets in The Republic was the first totally conscious rejection of this poetic mode of consciousness, in which general conceptual thought is impossible, in favor of abstract language and a new intellectual mode in which the autonomous rational personality apprehends objects of knowledge which are revealed through the integration and abstraction of particulars. This attack is seen as the culmination of a process which reveals itself in Hesiod and the pre-Socratics and terminates in the emergence of conceptual language and philosophical discourse in Platonic Greece.—T. C.