Across the Roman world as a whole, country and town, the number may have been very low, well under 20 per cent of adult men. But it must have been much higher than that in urban communities, where many small traders, craftsmen and slaves would have needed some level of basic literacy and numeracy to function successfully in their jobs (taking the orders, counting the cash, organising deliveries and so on). There are indications too that ‘functional literacy’ of that sort gave even the ‘middling’ people some stake in what we would think of as high classical culture.
