"militarism, ruralism, and irrationality"

Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations, p.276+:

The Ionian culture that was adopted as their own by the Greek-speaking world, and put on like a garment by the Latin-speaking world, was never the culture of the whole Mediterranean basin because it was the culture of the literate upper classes only. These were the slaveowning minority who knew how to read and write, who had leisure, and who used that leisure to read Homer, Plato, Cicero, and Virgil.

The great mass of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean world did not share this culture; they were born, worked, had children, and died. This great mass included the rural inhabitants at all times and even the majority of city dwellers at most times. In other words, the Classical culture we so esteem was the culture of a small minority of city dwellers except for a brief period of a century and a half (480-330 B.C.) in Athens. 

In this brief period it may be that the majority of the inhabitants of that city had some idea of what we call Classical culture. Otherwise, in other cities generally, and in rural areas always, the masses of the people lived in a morass of ignorance and superstition that is difficult for us to imagine. To them life was an irrational chaos of conflicting powers and forces of which the chief were a myriad of local gods and spirits.

This substratum of irrationality and localism beneath the veneer of Classical culture must always be kept in mind if we are to appreciate properly the great achievement of the small minority that possessed this culture and if we are to understand how this culture was destroyed when this minority was crushed and finally submerged by the rising tide of militarism, ruralism, and irrationality.

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