[dredmorbius]

I'm given to understand (as I neither speak nor read Chinese) that a fairly typical high-school or college educated modern Chinese can at least read some Confucious (551-479 BCE). There is no comparable English-language case as 1) Old English didn't exist until the 5th century -- the Britons of Roman time (43 CE) were Celts and spoke Celtic, 2) The Latin alphabet hadn't been imported, and 3) literary tradition was slight -- largely oral.

Even taking the tack of following Germanic Anglo-Saxon culture buys you little -- spoken and written language would be unintelligible.

A Western college graduate of ancient languages today might understand Latin, which could get you to 240 BCE, or possibly, with a different alphabet, Greek, whose earliest writings, the Illiad and the Odyssey, date to the 6th century BCE in written form. But that's not a common skill.

Greek and Latin had been taught, as part of the high school curriculum, through the 1940s or 50s, but not generally any longer. Keep in mind that high school graduation rates in 1900 in the US were about 6%, lower than Ph.D. attainment rates today.