the privileged position of antiquity.
Bodin was the first to do so.

Knowledge, letters, and arts have their vicissitudes, he says; they
rise, increase, and nourish, and then languish and die. After the decay
of Rome there was a long fallow period; but this was followed by a
splendid revival of knowledge and an intellectual productivity which
no other age has exceeded. The scientific discoveries of the ancients
deserve high praise; but the moderns have not only thrown new light
on phenomena which they had incompletely explained, they have made new
discoveries of equal or indeed greater importance. Take, for instance,
the mariner's compass which has made possible the circumnavigation of
the earth and a universal commerce, whereby the world has been
changed, as it were, into a single state. [Footnote: Cardan had
already signalised the compass, printing, and gunpowder as three modern
inventions, to which "the whole of antiquity has nothing equal to show."
He adds, "I pass over the other inventions of this age which, though
wonderful, form rather a development of ancient arts than surpass the
intellects of our ancestors." De subtilitate, lib. 3 ad init. (Opera,
iii. p. 609).] Take the advances we have made in geography and
astronomy; the invention of gunpowder; the development of the woollen
and other industries. The invention of printing alone can be set against
anything that the ancients achieved. [Footnote: Methodus, cap. VII.,
pp. 359-61. Bodin also points out that there was an improvement, in
some respects, in manners and morals since the early Roman Empire; for
instance, in the abolition of gladiatorial spectacles (p. 359).]

An inference from all this, obvious to a modern reader, would be that
in the future there will be similar oscillations, and new inventions and
discoveries as remarkable as any that have been made in the past. But
Bodin does not draw this inference. He confines himself to the past and
present, and has no word to say about the vicissitudes of the future.
But he is not haunted by any vision of the end of the world, or the
coming of Antichrist; three centuries of humanism lay between him and
Roger Bacon.

3.

And yet the influence of medievalism, which it had been the work of
those three centuries to overcome, was still pervasively there. Still
more the authority of the Greeks and Romans, which had been set up by
the revival of learning, was, without their realising it, heavy even
upon thinkers