Plebeians and their letters

[Carlton Bach]

I"m away from my bookshe;lves right now, but basically the aswer is "it depends" as far as we know. Literacy was not the decisive requirement for entry to polite society we think of it as today. There is evidence (from Vindolanda as well as Egypt IIRC) of even wealthy and pretty high-ranking people being if not illiterate, then unused to handling writing tools. On the other hand, writing was a useful skill for anyone in an urban environment. Given that the Latin alphabet is pretty much phonertic for Latin, learning how to use it was not that hard (certainly not as hard as for modern English-speakers blessed with the phoneme-grapheme relastionship from hell). So you"d find people far down the social scale being literate enough to keep notes, write graffiti and read advertising. AS you leave the city, this changes.

I recall reading an estimate that said about 80% of urban Italians, 60% of Egyptians overall and around 50% of soldiers having been literate, but this is very much IIRC and I"ll need to dig to find where it was from.