In Plato's time and place – Greece circa 400 BC – neither philosophy nor writing was particularly new. Understood in the generic sense of asking big questions, the former was as ancient as humanity itself. Understood in the sense of encoding spoken language, writing was already 2,500 years old. But the use of writing to practice philosophy was novel in Plato's day, and it was an open question as to whether the medium was up to the task. Plato didn't think so. He found the same fault with writing as he found with spoken rhetoric: neither allowed dialogue, the only means by which one could find the Truth. Like so many rhetorically adept politicians, written words “talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing for ever” (Phaedrus, 275D). Such monologues – spoken or written – were not only tedious, they were also the enemies of true understanding. But writing, Plato said, was worse than rhetoric, for it not only mislead people, it also made them pretentious fools. By “telling [readers] of many things without teaching them,” Plato wrote, “[written words] will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing; and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows” (Phaedrus, 275A). Writing's potential for causing harm was made greater by the fact that it separated speaker and speech. “Once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn't know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong people” (Phaedrus, 275D). From Plato's point of view, this sort of wandering was unacceptable. In a dialogic context, philosophers can fight back against unwarranted attacks. But once their words are captured in writing, they cannot. The mute text is “unable to defend or help itself” (Phaedrus, 275D). For all these reasons, Plato said, “no intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated, especially not into a form that is unalterable, which must be the case with what is expressed in written symbols” (Epistle VII, 343). It's little wonder, then, that Plato makes no provision for the teaching of writing in The Republic.