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abecedarius · 2014-10-19 · Original thread
Can you back up this claim of an illiterate Plato? That sounds like the sort of assertion this post complains about. Plato's dialogs do have Socrates complaining about book-learning.

AFAICT literacy rates in classical Athens are uncertain. I recently read http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Lives-Ancient-Greeks-Peoples/... which left me with an impression of relatively high rates for male citizens, but I don't remember anything concrete. Searching turns up http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/classical-stud... which says the orthodoxy is for low rates, but argues against it.

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