While studying under F. M. Cornford at Cambridge, Havelock began to question the received wisdom about the nature of pre-Socratic philosophy and, in particular, about its relationship with Socratic thought. In "The Literate Revolution in Greece", his penultimate book, Havelock recalls being struck by a discrepancy between the language used by the philosophers he was studying and the heavily Platonic idiom with which it was interpreted in the standard texts. It was well known that some of these philosophical texts (Parmenides, Empedocles) were written not only in verse but in the metre of Homer, who had recently been identified (still controversially at the time) by Milman Parry as an oral poet, but Cornford and other scholars of these early philosophers saw the practice as a fairly insignificant convention left over from Hesiod. Havelock eventually came to the conclusion that the poetic aspects of early philosophy "were matters not of style but of substance", and that such thinkers as Heraclitus and Empedocles actually have more in common even on an intellectual level with Homer than they do with Plato and Aristotle.