Comment by buescher

I think the best explanation is that classicists are not makeup artists. I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy. (I looked for the source I'm thinking of and it's drowned out by more credible modern attempts). There's a tendency the further north you go to think of the classical world as completely lost, discontinuous, and opaque to us, too, which adds to it.