113 "The discovery of the alphabet will create forget­ fulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of them­ selves ... You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing." ­Socrates, "Phaedrus" Homer's "Iliad" was the cultural encyclopedia of pre­literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that pro­ vided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives. All the per­ suasive skills of the poetic and the dramatic idiom were marshaled to insure the faithful transmission of the tradition from generation to generation. These Bardic songs were rhythmically organized with great formal mastery into metrical patterns which insured that everyone was psychologically attuned to memorization and to easy recall. There was no ear illiteracy in pre­literate Greece. In the "Republic," Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification ("The Ideas"), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. What the Greeks meant by "poetry" was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their "poetic" expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique