> Really?? I am very surprised to hear that, I never thought there could be any other way but having schools in a structured and developed society like theirs.

> Really?? I am very surprised to hear that, I never thought there could be any other way but having schools in a structured and developed society like theirs. Schools as we think of them today are a pretty recent invention. Even the Academies and Gymnasium of Athens were generally for adults. There was an exception in Sparta, where education was part of the facist indoctrination, similar to the system in the DDR or USSR. Then again, Sparta was super weird even by Greek standards (which was a society whose closest modern analog might be Da'esh (AKA ISIS). The hard part of reading ancient Greek for me was not the grammar but the sheer bizarreness of their structural assumptions, which are rarely visible in translation. > > OTOH the roman soldiers typically could read > Not to disbelieve but can you back that up? I thought the bulk of the Roman military was from pretty low down in society and literacy is usually low to negligible there That's the point: it's a confounding point to my assumption of low levels of literacy among the plebians. You can do your own web search on this topic, but you might want to start with this paper: https://www.academia.edu/37000249/Soldiers_and_Documents_Insights_from_Nubia_The_Significance_of_Written_Documents_in_Roman_Soldiers_Everyday_Lives https://www.academia.edu/37000249/Soldiers_and_Documents_Ins... From its abstract: "The Roman army as an institution and the Roman soldier as an individual could not have functioned without the written word. A few newly published finds from Primis / Qasr Ibrim in Lower Nubia as well as a number of other documents discussed in this paper illustrate the extent to which administrative paperwork and the soldiers’ (semi-)private correspondence contributed to the army’s functioning and governed the soldiers’ everyday lives already in the first decades of the new imperial army. Other evidence shows how the formal and symbolic qualities of imperial and official texts, and administrative documents served Roman soldiers from all types of units in their private documents and monuments as a means to demonstrate military identity"