ABSTRACT
A gap imposes itself in our story here. Much scholarship since Gibbon has been devoted to the reasons for the decline of the ancient world, the evaporation of the spirit of inquiry that had marked the first classical civilisations and the imposition of a supposedly ‘dark age’ dominated by dogmatic beliefs, imposed authority and oriental formalism. In fact the ‘decline’ had been a long and slow one and the ‘golden age’ had probably never been as golden as it suits us to believe.
