james_nicoll

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." - Marcus Tullius Cicero (allegedly; I haven't found a proper source for that).

High levels of literacy was considered a symptom of the End Times of the day?

The Romans were constantly worrying that the martial virtue that formed Rome was being undermined by the soft intellectualism of the Greeks.
-- NPH

Maybe he saw it as a sign of narcissism and self-indulgence.

Whether it's your theory or that of "NPH" that rules the day, it seems horrific that possessing literacy skills should ever be considered a threat to one's own nation.

Sadly, I suspect that quote is spurious. A nearly identical one is sometimes attributed to an "Assyrian" (or "Babylonian") tablet from "2800 BC" (or "3800 BC"); a discussion in this open thread at Making Light traced references back to 1908, without getting anything like an actual scholarly source.