Two men walk out beyond the city wall on a hot day and sit down under a plane tree by a stream. Late in the conversation Socrates tells a story about an Egyptian god who invents number, geometry, astronomy, dice, and letters, and brings them to the king to be distributed.

The king takes each in turn and gives a judgement. At letters he stops.

This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

Thamus to Theuth, in Plato, Phaedrus, 275a (Jowett)

The rest of the judgement is harder. Writing is not a remedy for memory but for reminding. Students given it will hear much and be taught nothing, will appear to know much and generally know nothing, and will be tiresome company, having the reputation of wisdom without the reality.

Socrates wrote nothing down. Not this, not anything. The conversation is available because a student took the objection to writing and wrote it out, and it has been in continuous circulation for two and a half thousand years in the form its speaker said would hollow out the people who used it.

Every word of the case against writing reaches us in writing. There is no other copy.