Ill-literati

Plato, says Havelock, attacks the poets on the basis of a supposed ethical and/or moral deficiency of a purely oral culture, and his attacks on the sophists, whose use of rhetorical technique follows a similar techno-aesthic exigency (persuasion by mellifluity), seem to follow from this. Havelock seems to base his argument on the interpretive power of this explanation; it allows us to integrate the Platonic corpus more elegantly than previous canonical readings which downplay the attack on poetry (cf. Havelock, p.6-7).
but this ethico-moralistic point bears closer examination:

"the Greek adolescent is continually conditioned to an attitude which at bottom is cynical. It is more important to keep up appearances than to practise [sic] the reality. Decorum and decent behavior are not obviously violated, but the inner principle of morality is." (Havelock, p.12 again, my italics.)

this "pure morality", Havelock asserts, constitutes the Platonic (or Socratic, if you will) innovation:

"It is to be defined and defended for its own sake; its rewards and penalties are to be treated as incidental, and it is to be demonstrated ... [as] the happiest human condition." (ibid.)

it is developed and defined in pedagogical terms (in the Republic, for example) in contradistinction to the 'poetic' pedagogy that Havelock identifies as the essential constellation of attributes accompanying an oral culture that must have dominated Presocratic Greece. TBC'd...