title: Preface to Plato (History of the Greek Mind)
author:  Eric A. Havelock 
description: This book makes a major contributionwill offer the reader many hours of stimulating thought and a powerful challenge to reexamine some basic assumptions about the early Greek mind.<b><i></i></b><b><i>The Classical Bulletin</i></b><br /><br />The frontiers of several fields of research meet in this rich and germinal study. Professor Havelock is concerned with Greek epic poetry and Platos attack on it, with the whole of the Greek <i>paideia</i> as it existed before and after Plato, with the technological problems of communication, and, finally, with the emergence of Platos doctrine of forms, in its total cultural setting In brief, Havelocks point is that Platos attack on poetry is integral to his philosophy as such if we see poetry as what it really was in his day Havelocks thesis is a sweeping one, and, on the whole, utterly convincing, tying in with the findings of an increasing number of recent psychological, historical, philosophical, and cultural studies.<b><i></i></b><b>Walter J. Ong</b><br /><br />A book bursting with new ideas, all of them exciting. It may well turn out to be a landmark in the study of Greek thought and literature.<b><i></i></b><b>B. M. W. Knox</b>
zlib_text: Digitized by the Internet Archive 
  in 2018 with funding from 
  Kahle/Austin Foundation 
  https://archive.org/details/prefacetoplato01have 
  
  BOSTON 
  PUBLIC 
  LIBRARY 
  
  r 
  
  A HISTORY OF THE GREEK MIND 
  VOLUME ONE 
  PREFACE TO PLATO 
  
  By the same author 
  The Lyric Genius of Catullus 
  The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man 
  The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics 
  
  PREFACE TO 
  PLATO 
  ERIC A. HAVELOCK 
  BELKNAP PRESS OF 
  HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
  CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 
  1963 
  
  © 1963 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College 
  All rights reserved 
  Published in Great Britain by 
  Basil Blackwell, Oxford 
  Leisure for the completion of this work was indirectly afforded the author 
  during the course of an appointment as visiting fellow in the Ford Humanities 
  Project administered by the Council of the Humanities of Princeton Univer¬ 
  sity. His debt to the Council and its officers, to Princeton University, and 
  also to the Ford Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. 
  Library of Congress Catalog Card 