The alphabet is a technology of visual fragmentation and specialism, and it led the Greeks quickly to the discovery of classifiable data. Havelock clarified this at length in his Preface to Plato. As long as the oral culture was not overpowered by the technological extension of the visual power in the alphabet, there was a very rich cultural result from the interplay of oral and written forms. The revival of oral culture in our own electric age now exists in a similar fecund relation with the still powerful written and visual culture. We are in our century “winding the tape backwards”. The Greeks went from oral to written even as we are moving from written to oral. They “ended” in a desert of classified data even as we could “end” in a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation.