 At the same time that he was becoming increasingly vocal and visible in politics , Havelock 's scholarly work was moving toward the concerns that would occupy him for the bulk of his career . The first questions he raised about the relationship between literacy and orality in Greece concerned the nature of the historical Socrates , which was a long @-@ debated issue . Havelock 's position , drawn from analyses of Xenophon and Aristophanes as well as Plato himself , was that Plato 's presentation of his teacher was largely a fiction , and intended to be a transparent one , whose purpose was to represent indirectly Plato 's own ideas . He argued vociferously against the idea associated with John Burnet , which still had currency at the time , that the basic model for the theory of forms originated with Socrates . Havelock 's argument drew on evidence for a historical change in Greek philosophy ; Plato , he argued , was fundamentally writing about the ideas of his present , not of the past . Most earlier work in the field had assumed that , since Plato uses Socrates as his mouthpiece , his own philosophical concerns must have been similar to those debated in the Athens of his youth , when Socrates was his teacher . Havelock 's contention that Socrates and Plato belonged to different philosophical eras was the first instance of one that would become central to his work : that a basic shift in the kinds of ideas being discussed by intellectuals , and the methods of discussing them , happened at some point between the end of the fifth century BC and the middle of the fourth . 
