 While studying under F. M. Cornford at Cambridge , Havelock began to question the received wisdom about the nature of pre @-@ Socratic philosophy and , in particular , about its relationship with Socratic thought . In The Literate Revolution in Greece , his penultimate book , Havelock recalls being struck by a discrepancy between the language used by the philosophers he was studying and the heavily Platonic idiom with which it was interpreted in the standard texts . It was well known that some of these philosophical texts ( Parmenides , Empedocles ) were written not only in verse but in the metre of Homer , who had recently been identified ( still controversially at the time ) by Milman Parry as an oral poet , but Cornford and other scholars of these early philosophers saw the practice as a fairly insignificant convention leftover from Hesiod . Havelock eventually came to the conclusion that the poetic aspects of early philosophy " were matters not of style but of substance , " and that such thinkers as Heraclitus and Empedocles actually have more in common even on an intellectual level with Homer than they do with Plato and Aristotle . However , he did not publicly break from Cornford until many years later . 
