/lit/ - Literature

I'm reading this and I'm having a real hard time understanding intellectual development in 5th century Athens. I'm just having trouble synthesizing a bunch of seemingly disparate facts into a coherent whole.

The story the book presents is that education in general was very low-quality, with an emphasis on instilling traditional values, etc. Most people couldn't read, of course. How did these illiterate, barely-educated, backward, traditionalists watch highly intellectually challenging theater all the time?

Then we have the Sophists who are set against that style of learning, instead being extreme skeptics and focusing on practical skills to succeed in Polis politics.

But Socrates/Plato (and later Aristotle) are against both of those strains. Where the hell did these guys come from? Was Socrates part of some earlier intellectual tradition? A reaction against the Sophists? Something entirely new? And what was their status in Athenian society? On the one hand we see Aristophanes mocking Socrates, and the eventual execution. On the other hand they seem to have been very close to the most powerful citizens (Pericles, Alcibiades).