Eric Havelock made presentations at the annual meetings of the American Philological Association (APA) throughout the 1930’s. Abstracts appeared in the Transactions and Proceedings of the APA (TAPA) in 1932 (‘The Milesian Philosophers’), 1934 (‘The Evidence for the Teaching of Socrates’)¹, 1936 (‘Eastern Origins of Greek Philosophy’) and 1940 (‘The Professional Technique of the Sophists’). 

The 1940 lecture was never published, but it circulated among classicists as late as the 1970s. Here are some excerpts from it:

Before we hasten to eulogise the Greeks too extravagantly for tolerating doses of philosophy at their [athletic] race-meetings, we should remember that this was due less to their genius than to primitive conditions of publication.

 The technique of [oral information] transmission relied partly on the regular public rituals and artistic poetic festivals. These were less an expression of any peculiar Greek artistic genius than the necessary apparatus of [oral] paideia in a community of primitive social organisation.

A casual lecturer today speaks in a context which has already been prepared (…) [she] addresses audiences which have at least read books and newspapers. In the fifth century B.C. Greek minds had not been prepared, either by institutional teaching or book reading, to move in [such] a common context of ideas,² Thus the teacher of ideas could communicate them effectively only by prolonged personal association with his audience.³

Higher education, considered as an institution, evolved out of an adaptation of the Greek use of “spare time”. “Leisure” [σχολή] had once meant freedom from physical labour and affairs (ἔργα καὶ πράγματα). The word and the notion were now being twisted to mean a sort of “preoccupied leisure” and in the late fourth century (…) came to signify the actual preoccupations, that is, studies and lectures and reading, which filled in this special sort of leisure.

Higher education had been a by-product of the social process; [the sophists] were engaged in turning it into an article of direct manufacture.

To the study of Greek history and society in the first millennium BC, Havelock brought questions of function from Marxist economics, from anthropology, and from sociology. He asked how information storage functioned in its pre-literate era to maintain a high culture (especially in architecture and poetry). Then the question arose how the transition from such a pre-literate to a literate society was made, especially in regard to education. And finally, related investigation was required into the question of how the new literate “context” functioned in terms of the understandings and social forms it enabled.

These were questions that Havelock would famously treat almost a quarter century later in his 1963 Preface to Plato. But in 1940 Havelock was already suggesting that language should be treated as medium, not message. Words needed to be understood in terms of their oral or literate “context” and this was therefore their medium in the sense of being their variable culture of meaning and message (social culture, but also the laboratory sense of ‘culture’).

The word ‘paideia‘, as used by the Greeks themselves and by their modem interpreters, suffers from ambiguity precisely because it was used indifferently to describe both these [oral and literate] stages and the transition between them.

The term ‘paideia‘ was misleading if taken as having a constant meaning. To be used rigorously, that is, informatively, it had to be correlated with its medium. Furthermore, Havelock was already suggesting, this in 1940, that changes in communication media produced revolutionary changes throughout society.⁴ In both of these ways, and in the additional way of being the required focus for new investigation, the medium was the message.