Could Classical Civilization do anything But Die?

What would have happened if the classical civilization continued? Some SciFi writers conjectured the dark ages and the Church set civilization back 1000 years, and if classical civilization continued, we'd now have space ships and humanoid robots like in Star Trek.

I don't think so. Classical civilization probably did all it could ever do. To me, cultures look a whole lot like ecosystems and all the elements therein co-evolve to a stable form within an unstable dynamic environment.

There might not be a path from classical Rome or Greece to the sort of technological society we have now just as a bird is on a different evolutionary path than a mammal.

Our civilization also seems to be stuck in a rut of developing technology as the means of transformation, or seeing technology as the only meaningful product of work or human life.