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"That Aristotle, Plato's greatest pupil, had no patience with any primitivistic beliefs goes without saying. For him, “the earliest known human beings, whether they were ‘earth-born' or the survivors of some cataclysm, were in all probability similar to ordinary or even foolish people today. (Indeed that is actually the tale that is told of the ‘earth-born' men.) It would therefore be an absurdity to remain constant to their notions" (Politics II, 8, 1269 a 4-
, to the “barbarism," the “utter foolishness" of ancient customs. (1268 b 39 ff.)." (p.64)"The characteristic note of thought in the fourth century, then, was not one of disillusionment with civilization itself. That human life and civilized life are one and the same and that the arts and crafts and sciences are great achievements of the human race, if not the very greatest, remained the firmly established conviction of the vast majority. Primitivism, the most dangerous enemy of progressivism, was on the wane rather than gaining in favor. It is not true that men, disappointed by the present, took refuge in a past when life had been less unwieldy and therefore less frustrating. They did not assume that mankind had decayed or that the original conditions of existence in a Golden Age had been a surer warrant of happiness.
This is not very strange, for among the intellectuals, at any rate, the general conviction was that men were living in an age of incomparably great advance in all fields of intellectual endeavor. Aristotle asserted that “ now" progress had been made from small beginnings within the shortest time by those concerned with geometry, logic, and the other disciplines such as had been made by no generation before in any of the sciences. (Iamblichus, De Comm. Math. Scientia, 26 = Aristotle, Fr. 53 [Rose]; cf. Fr. 52 [Rose] = Euclid, p. 28, 13 [Friedlein].) He had seen philosophy too make immense progress in a span of only a few years. (Fr. 53 [Rose] = Cicero, Tusc. Disp.y III, 28, 69.)27 Plato had given specific examples of the rapidity of the progress made. In one of his earlier works, he introduced as quite recent what he considered to be the true doctrine concerning the surface of the earth (Phaedoy 108 C ); and late in life he asserted that “not long ago” the course of the planets had come to be adequately understood (Laws VII, 821 E) and only “now” had the regularity of the movement of all celestial bodies and the nature of the forces controlling their movements, “before” only suspected, been fully grasped. (Laws XII, 967 A-D.) “Rather belatedly,” he said, a theory of irrational numbers had been framed. (Laws VII, 819 D .)." (pp.68-69)
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(pp.73-76)
-Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity,
