I'm not even sure there was a dramatic fall in terms of quality of life, after the fall of the roman empire I mean imagine what the roman empire looked like on its last leg... At the elite level, yeah, intellectual elites, knowledge, lots of stuffs were lost, but for the common man... What's the difference? He still get to live in the same shit, roughly. It's not like the roman empire was some sort of nanny state to begin with, "bread and circus" aside of course...