On the general point that the European literate culture pretty much starts with classical Greece: yeah. OTOH if you look just a little later at people like Eucl

On the general point that the European literate culture pretty much starts with classical Greece: yeah. OTOH if you look just a little later at people like Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, ... you see work that's both correct and of the highest quality. I wish there was much more left from that era to give us a better idea how that happened. Later antiquity had terrible taste in what to preserve.