It's strange that so many people live with glasses and/or contacts these days.
In the far distant past, before the invention of the modern set of glasses, specifically with the height of the Roman empire (ie- post Augustus Caesar, pre-Diocletian), do we have any evidence that people managed and dealt with their ocular issues in any beneficial ways?
Or is bad vision only an aspect of an affluent modern society?
Most likely they probably just dealt with it. However, we do know that they were aware that grinding clearer stones to a particular degree allowed magnified vision. Pliny's Natural History 37.16 says:
In form they are mostly concave, so as to re-unite the rays of light and the powers of vision: and hence it is, that it is so universally agreed upon among mankind to respect these stones, and to forbid their surface to be engraved. In the case, however, of the stones of Scythia and Egypt, their hardness is such, that it would be quite impossible to penetrate them. When the surface of the smaragdus is flat, it reflects the image of objects in the same manner as a mirror. The Emperor Nero used to view the combats of the gladiators upon a smaragdus.
One interpretation of this passage is that Nero was near-sighted and needed an instrument to see the gladiator combat. However, I don't believe this is universally acknowledged.
Actually bad vision appears much less in societies where people spend much less time indoors and doing things on the computer...etc. There was a scientific study done a few years ago comparing Chinese kids in China and Chinese immigrant kids in Australia. They found that the vast majority of the kids in China had eye problems, while a much smaller percentage of Chinese kids in Australia had eye problems. Why the difference? Chinese kids in Australia spent much more time outdoors. So eye problems in older times were much less prevalent compared to today. http://www.economist.com/news/china/21631113-why-so-many-chinese-children-wear-glasses-losing-focus