It pretty much was wickedness. There were a number of much more egalitarian traditions -- whether we want to talk about insular monastics or village structures or the Scottish Enlightenment or even the pre-Great Harry function of the church -- the drive for supremacy in war doesn't explain all the choices the neo-classicism of the Enlightenment made.

I am quite all right with people studying classics in university, all the same; James was talking about a middle school curriculum. I'd want to leave classics entirely out of that.