The Forgotten Revolution by Russo blames the establishment of the Roman empire instead -- or rather all the troubles in the couple centuries before. For example, he showed a timeline of astronomical observations used by Ptolemy: it had bars over the centuries from around 700 BC (iirc) down to Hipparchus in the 100s BC, then nothing until Ptolemy's era around 100 AD (which Russo thought a weak revival with people like Ptolemy more mining the libraries than really reestablishing scientific and technical progress).
The author is more of a physicist than a historian, fwiw.
The author is more of a physicist than a historian, fwiw.