Classical Education's Aristocracy of Anyone

In grade school, my classmates and I played a game in which the girls were ancient Roman patricians, running imagined villas where trees stood behind the church that housed our school, and the boys got to be themselves — the barbarian tribes of the frontier, harrying the empire. We created — to memory at least — a complicated, foliage-based economy, with markets and "international" trade, and jump-rope chariots, and slave revolts. Latin is a dead language to most Americans, but we were not going to let all the conjugating and declining we had been doing go to waste. Even if we couldn't properly speak her tongue, Rome was alive enough to us; we had read all about her, because we were students at Cedar Tree Classical Christian School.