Antiquity

Ships and agriculture, fortifications and laws, arms, clothing, and all else of this kind, life’s prizes, its luxuries also from first to last, poetry and pictures. the shaping of statues by the artist, all these as men progressed gradually step by step were taught by practice and the experiments of the active mind. So by degress time brings up before us every single thing, and reason lifts in into the precints of light. For their intelect saw one thing after another grow famous amongst the arts, until they came to their highest point.
Lucretiu s (Titus Lucretius Carus)