Inasmuch as this is true, is has been true in all historical eras, including the present.
The ancients actually did invent and discover many, many things, just not all the things which we have now, and most of what we have now could not have been invented or discovered when it was if it were not for the fact that the ancients, and other people in between, had already inevented or discovered the things that they did.
And just to add to this last point, printing is also of little use in a culture where paper is unknown, and the alternatives, papyrus and parchment, are scarce, expensive, resource-limited, and labor-intensive to produce.
I accept that printing is predicated on paper if you refuse to print on cloth or parchment (I have seen printing on both) but I honestly can’t understand why someone who could build a combat or racing chariot would be “incapable” of manufacturing a draisine/dandy horse… I can only imagine they had not thought to or did not care to do so.
Lacquer/solvent silk screen printing relies on no esoteric modern materials… it just wasn’t something people were doing 800 years ago.
Sometimes things were not invented because they were, unwanted, sometimes because ther was no economic incentive (given slave labor for example) what interests me is an explanation for when possible inventions do not occur in the absence of those countervailing forces.
I was wondering if someone would point me toward a consideration of that problem.
There seems to me to be a difference between technologies the require inventions that do not yet exist in a certain point in time and those that require only inventions that do exist but have not been applied in that manner. I can not yet understand an argument to the contrary. Maybe some day I will 
They were no more intelligent or stupid than people are now
That seems to me to be an odd position to take without argument or evidence one way or the other but it is the subject for another thread.
Again - I think the OP question underestimates the quality of metallurgy in ancient times. A lot of metalwork replaced quality, reliable metal with volume and weight to get reliable metal. Modern cycles, even 1800’s bicycles, were beneficiaries of 500 years of how to cast and work ever more flawless steel (and other metals) on the way to making cannon, guns, boilers for steam engines, etc; this allowed modern tech to produce a light but reliable frame, forks, wheels.
King Tut’s chariot (image google it) may have been made with relatively thin wood wheels and only 6 spokes, but Egypt was very flat and had beaten earth roads, while Greece was basically rocks forming hills. Plus, look at the axles that go with those thin wood wheels. I assume they use greased hardwood as a substitute for bearings, which results in a lot more friction - not as big a problem for a horse. The forks that would hold those axles would be pretty solid. Anyone able to afford that sort of fancy woodwork could afford a horse, so a bike would be a silly toy like the Greek steam engine.
Also, metal was so valuable until recently that any left unattended was stolen. The lead that bound the Greek columns drums together was chipped out the moment there was no law and order to prevent it. (Of course, nobody steals copper today, eh?)
It is a very reasonable default assumption. It would certainly be very odd and unjustifiable to take a contrary position without extensive argument and evidence to the contrary, and in many decades of studying and teaching about the history of human thought I cannot recall ever coming across any such evidence or any serious, well informed argument to that effect.
Why didn’t they put wheels on suitcases back in the late 1800s? Unlike the example in the OP, they actually had the prerequisite technology back then. Yet I don’t think wheeled suitcases became common until the 1980s.
In the 1800s the sort of people who had suitcases had servants, bellhops, and railway porters and the like to carry them (and they often had wheeled trolleys).
This, though, is at least a real example of an invention that did not arrive until well after the technological prerequisites to make it possible were in place, and by the time I was a kid in the '60s and '70s plenty of people, most people, who had suitcases no longer had servants. I guess this is just a case of nobody (or nobody in a position to do much about it, such as working in the luggage making industry) thinking of it for a while. Still, the gap to be accounted for is only a few decades, not the over two millennia between the ancient Greeks and the invention of the bicycle.
To the OP. Start by asking the even more puzzling question why wasn’t the bicycle invented in “modern” Europe invented 50 years earlier, or 200 even?
Egg of Columbus all over again.
Bicycles were born out of necessity.
Cities were overpopulated with horses–therefore, with horse dung.
Bicycles were embraced as a means of reducing the urban horse dung problem.
I doubt Ancient Greece had sufficient population, in either men or horses, to render this an issue.
A reasonably light spoked wheel can be made without machine tools along the same lines as a cart wheel, but slimmed down. Cart wheels were only bulky/heavy because they needed to bear considerable load.
The thing is, until bikes were made of high-quality, durable steel they were not light enough to be practical transportation. Until well into the industrial revolution, mass production of that quality of item would not be cheap enough to be an alternative to walking for the only-slightly better off public.
The only people that would have such a thing as a wood bicycle would only have it as a toy, and had better ways to get around. A wood bicycle would have been so much work and exercise it was not a practical alternative means of transport. (Recall reading about one of the early wooden bicycles in the 1700’s or so - no steering, ride it like a hobby horse. Unless you are doing a lot of smooth slight downhill, how practical is that? Better have brakes, too)
Remember, the key was the chain, something that was only practical by the late 1800’s. Leather belts would eventually stretch and slip; if you put cog-holes in them, they tear. Shaft-drive requires an incredibly strong crown gear or such to change the angle of the drive (at both ends) and cutting gears was either expensive and time-consuming hand labour, or beyond the tech of most early craftsmen, even if they could make the durable steel required (and cut that durable steel).
Roman roads may have been paver, but with flat wide stones to prevent soldiers’ feet from making mud. In Pompeii, for example, the carts had made very deep ruts in the softer volcanic paving; at crossings, there were stepping stones as high as the sidewalk to avoid the exhaust from horses and oxen. Even in the cleaner areas, it would still have been a bouncing ride.
I submit the following:
http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI/223/1606/PreviewComp/SuperStock_1606-113446.jpg
I think that something bicyclish can be built low tech without the use of complex metallurgy or modern materials.
Granted this particular one (and the actual one I was looking for) were probably of limited practical use except as a toy. And also the idea is copied from a bicycle that had already been invented. There is however no reason why this kind of design couldn’t have been the birth of the bicycle. And no reason why it couldn’t have had its origins in ancient Greece or Polynesia or just about any other place.
The thing is that it didn’t happen that way. Novel ideas are actually quite rare. Successful execution of those ideas even rarer. And successful implementation of an idea and integration on a large scale into a culture, even rarer.
Well yes. The trouble with that,though (apart from the fact that it is entirely fictional, and Columbus did not even know he had discovered a ‘new world’), is that although the moral, “once the feat has been done, anyone knows how to do it,” is very apropos to the OP’s question, in this case the merchants in the story were clearly right, and fictional Columbus was full of shit.
If Columbus had not tried to reach Asia by sailing west, somebody else almost certainly would have tried to do it before very long, and with the same result. The world had been known to be round since the Ancient Greeks discovered it (fecklessly wasting the time they should have been spending inventing bicycles and phonographs), and maritime technology and navigational techniques had fairly recently reached the point where a voyage of that length across the open ocean looked feasible. Columbus taking the plunge first owed more to the fact that he seriously underestimated the circumference of the Earth (despite the fact that those Greeks had, again, long since provided a much more accurate estimate - SLAP! Naughty! Should have been inventing the camera, guys!) than to any valid and original insight on his part.
they didn’t need to invent the bicycle; they had the Olympics.
I saw those “bicycles” on Al Jazeera TV news. (incredibly informative about stuff outside the USA).
These are used in some African city (in Kenya?) where the farmlands are high above the city and it’s a steady downhill into the city. They are hand-made with rough carpenter tools. They also take advantage of wide flat mud/gravel roads built for automobiles. You can’t see it in the picture, but the other key part is a small board lying over the rear wheel; you stand on it to brake, because the vehicle goes downhill fast enough, the slope is fast enough, that braking is the most important part of control.
It was quite fascinating. part of the “bulk” of the construction is that they are intended to carry (and often do) loads in excess of half a ton -logs from the highland mountains, agricultural products piled high, etc. For the last 10 or 20 miles into town this is the cheapest transportation.
Of course, life is dirt-poor there and pushing the “bikes” back uphill is a long and arduous work - as these guys seem to be doing.
This thing from another comment:
Says it was around 1820 when the industrial revolution was getting rolling, metal work would be significantly cheaper, good quality metal tools for woodwork cheaper and more available, and pre-finished lumber easier to obtain; and it’s still clunky and does not go much faster than a brisk walk. If the road is the least bit bumpy (like cobblestones) then it would be uncomfortable. If the road was muddy from a lot of rain, it looks like travel with this would be alot more hassle than it was worth. The more weight, the more effort; the less weight, the more likely that jarring will evenually rattle the thing apart.
Rondo Cameron in A Concise Economic History of the World:
A still more fundamental reason for the limits to, and the ultimate failure of, the classical economy transcends the immediate causes of the decline of Rome, however: the lack of technological creativity. This technological sterility stands in sharp contrast to the cultural brilliance of at least some periods of ancient civilization. …classical art and literature… philosophy, mathematics, and some branches of science. Some of the properties of steam were known to the ancients, although the only applications were in producing toys and devices to mystify the credulous; the waterwheel and windmill were invented at least as early as the first century BC, but were not widely adopted until the European Middle Ages. Roman engineering ingenuity manifested itself in roads, aqueducts and domed building, but not in labor saving machinery…
The explanation appears to lie in the socioeconomic structure and the nature of the attitudes and incentives it generated. Most productive work was done either by slaves or by servile peasants whose status differed little from that of slaves. Even if they had had an opportunity to improve technology, they would have reaped few if any benefits, either in terms of higher income or reduced labor. Members of the small privileged classes devoted themselves to war, government, the cultivation of the fine arts and sciences and conspicuous consumption. They lacked both the experience and the inclination to experiment with the means of production, since labor carried the stigma of menial status. …A society based on slavery may produce great masterworks of art and literature, but it cannot produce sustained economic growth.
In contrast the plow and later the clock were produced by medieval tinkers, a time when the rewards of practical experimentation had shifted somewhat.
It was probably not a coincidence that the Wright brothers made and repaired bicycles. It was a pretty high tech field 120 years ago (and still is if you are serious about). Which was something that puzzled me as a child because bicycles seemed like kid’s toys and airplanes seemed sophisticated.
In addition to the already thorough discussion, I just want to add that we mustn’t confuse the lack of prevalence of a technology with its absence.
It’s entirely possible that the Athenian equivalent of a garage tinkerer came up with something - but no record of it survives and it never “caught on,” so to speak.
Much like the flying cars of our 20th century might be 1000 years hence - to pick an easy imperfect example.
But this is the same issue of practicality vs. possible.
A flying car is “possible”, there are several examples. However -
-like the Osprey, which has crashed an abnormal amount of times, recovery from some forms of engine/transmission failure is not likely.
So the tech is “barely there”. With advances - in electrical storage or lightweight gas engines, with better computer control, lighter stronger materials - we will eventually have practical “flying cars” - except like private planes, who can afford to own and operate something that could take several years’ salary to buy? An invention needs to be financially practical too.
Similarly, yes, we could maybe have had something not much different than that 1820’s wood cycle - but that was not too popular either, because it was not practical either. It took much more lightweight bikes, chained and geared so they could be driven easily and substantially faster than walking, to make bicycles popular.
This is very similar to flying. The Wright bothers’ major invention was “wing warping”, discovering how to control a much heavier flying kite object when it got too heavy for using the shifting of body weight. But practical flying machines required something more advanced in weight vs horsepower than the current steam engines - and the brand new internal combustion engine was what manned flight was waiting for. (Side note - IIRC the Wrights also built functional IC engines from scratch using their materials and tools at hand. There’s an interesting project for the DIY type. )