 Eric Alfred Havelock ( / ˈhævlɒk / ; 3 June 1903 – 4 April 1988 ) was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States . He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s . In the 1960s and 1970s , he served as chair of the classics departments at both Harvard and Yale . Although he was trained in the turn @-@ of @-@ the @-@ 20th @-@ century Oxbridge tradition of classical studies , which saw Greek intellectual history as an unbroken chain of related ideas , Havelock broke radically with his own teachers and proposed an entirely new model for understanding the classical world , based on a sharp division between literature of the 6th and 5th centuries BC on the one hand , and that of the 4th on the other . 
