Since I'm assuming that Bret Devereaux [1] isn't here to raise the point, I'll do it instead: "ancient people" is a term that, as we colloquially understand it, tends to exclude most of the ancient people, namely, the peasants. Sure, a Roman would sit with their aqueducts, but for that one person in the city you need a couple orders of magnitude more people working the fields.
As I understand Bret's last post about the life of peasants[2] regarding how they saw life,
> the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles. There’s a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as a set of ‘ages’ or ‘cycles,’ with the present, in a sense, endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these societies technological and social progress, while real is often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a normal human lifespan.
[2] https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...
I think your (perhaps intentionally) missing the point as a pretext to pontificate about and link to things that are only tangentially related.
Even if these people aren't well recorded in history you can take a pretty ironclad estimate as to what they thought in aggregate by looking at the clergy, the administrators, etc, etc and what they were preaching, saying, etc.
How one sees their individual life doesn't have direct bearing on the society they live in.
Let's take for example a farmer on the outskirts of some village in southwest England. His bloodline may have been occupying the same land for Millenia. Their feelings about doing so may not even change over that time. But depending on the century you put him in he and everyone else in the society he lives in think of the way they fit into the larger world very differently.