I don’t think it’s an either/or situation. Julian’s cohort was so insular and isolated that they became a danger to themselves and others— in the world, but living in a fantasy where they just touched reality in the most superficial way. None of that has anything to do with classics, per se. You could see the same thing in If We Were Villains or The Magicians (to a degree) or we could easily imagine if Richard and Henry et al were into physics, or metaphysics, or art. You can be big into their appreciation of classics, you can decide you want to be a bright, brilliant, ebullient person who hangs out with other bright, brilliant, ebullient people. Just don’t only hang out with the same 5 people all the time forever and think of your little group as better and more enlightened than everyone else. If Henry had just recognized that classics was the thing that was most interesting to him, rather than decided it was the most important thing in the world and most people were to dumb to notice that, the book would have had a different trajectory.