Outgoing

"Hi Richard,

So why couldn't the the Late Classical world have gone on forever, getting more and more refined and skeptical, and eventually discovering anesthesia and antibiotics?  They already had sanitation and sewerage such as the world would not see again--after Attila the Hun cut the aqueducts--for 1,500 years. And they were very close to precision engineering (they had ball bearings).  Why, oh why, couldn't they have just stuffed the Slavs and the Alans and the Alemani back behind the Caspian Sea and gone on?  Why did so many heavy heaps of mischief have to fall before Italians discovered quick-recovery hot water heaters?  Reading Lucian, nothing seems more unlikely than the Dark Night of Barbarism and Religion that came after him.

Douglas."