Could the Epicurean theory be brought up to date?
2.
Bodin deals with the question almost entirely in respect to human knowledge.

In definitely denying the degeneration of man, Bodin was only expressing what many thinkers of the sixteenth century had been coming to feel, though timidly and obscurely.

The philosophers and men of science, who criticised the ancients in special departments, did not formulate any general view on 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.