Aristocles Absent

Dystopias are fairly common when it comes to AH, so I decided to make a decidedly utopian scenario (sorry about the faux Greek).

POD is that Plato can't stand Socrates' death and commits suicide shortly thereafter. A different account of Socrates' attitude spreads, picturing him as a skeptic with an intuition of an objective truth and a critical method of inquiry, and that image reaches Aristotle, who applies to physics the same experimental method he used for biology, making dicoveries with military appliance. At the same time, Plato's disregard for the material world vanishes from the Academic scene. Alexander expands even further, and defeats Rome, which becomes just another hellenistic kingdom after Alexander's death. In the subsequent century, great advancements in optics, engineering and anatomy are made, and trade routes to China become common. The old world enters a scientific revolution.