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Arguably, that is because because the Greeks and Romans did not have the printing press. They were also vastly poorer societies than the later ones.
Today's societies can very well afford to feed their median member for a year while they write a thesis project. Ancient Rome could definitely not afford that. Presumably, a lot of subsistence farmers would have jumped at the chance to stop doing back-breaking labor and go to college. Realistically, the only two groups who were able to write were the rich and the ones who were found interesting enough by the rich to get sponsored. An attitudinal and factual report of senior high school girls concerning physical characteristics of houses related to social and personal development (which I picked at random, not saying it is bad or anything) is unlikely something some patrician would have fed you to write.
My best guess is that little great, published literature has been lost since the spread of the printing press. Of course, historians might bemoan that boring unpopular texts of the 1600s might also not have survived (because they might still offer a window into the past), but I doubt that the world has been deprived of much printed works of the caliber of Aristotle.
Technically, thé bottleneck is earlier than that- in the carolingian era writing technology changed to use standardized fonts, codex binding, and parchment/vellum, mass produced by professional copyists(as opposed to much better educated scribes). If ancient works survived to this point in Western Europe, we usually still have them- even if only one or two copies- barring political upheaval that might burn libraries and the like.
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