why are the Ancient times spoken so highly of and why do the middle ages seem to be so dark?

MFW people go off on the 'bad Middle Ages' kick again

This baleful view of the Medieval era comes from several quarters who have vested interests in portraying the Middle Ages as a dark time. An easy culprit is Petrarch, who notably whined about not having been born in Rome. But if you even so much as poke a Medievalist (or me, that weird guy who hangs around near the Medievalists), this notion of the 'dark' Middle Ages is going to be one of the first things they discount. Browse through u/sunagainstgold's post history and you rapidly see why she always says "The Middle Ages are the best ages".

For a basic one-post overview, here's u/BRIStoneman addressing some comparable claims of 'downfall' and why they don't work out. There's also the FAQ sections for the Early Medieval plus the High and Late Medieval periods, for general browsing.

For more reading material, ah. Since it's Christmas where I am, you, OP, are about to get a whole mess of reading material in the posts following this one, since you're asking after a good few topics. Take your time, it'll still be here when you come back. Also, happy Christmas!

(Addendum after I went and did it: It's not as extensive as I was hoping to present - I was intending to address all of the points you raised, OP - but I just remembered I asked to continue working over the hols and this article isn't going to write itself, so I've had to cut it a bit shorter than I wanted to. It's still a fair chunk of reading material - and again, Happy Christmas.)

They also ate better food, not to mention their rich religion and mythology, many mythological characters are still present in todays sayings... There’s a lot more I can add, literature was highly developed, many of the greatest philosophers lived in those times and they held lectures for younger, aspiring philosophers, they had elections and philosophical debates, their theater was great, they had comedies, tragedies and dramas and so on.

Hey, so /u/DanKensington has already done his customary excellent subreddit literature review of the subject, but I just wanted to pick up on some of these presumptions here, especially because they're almost entirely subjective. One of the most confusing things about the "Classicism vs Medievalism divide" is the fact that both 'schools', if you will, are almost entirely dependent on sources which focus almost exclusively on the wealthy, the powerful and the elite, but somehow pop history assumes that everyone in Classical Rome was a philosopher-patrician banqueting on doormouse and wine in their giant, heated villa, while everybody in the medieval period was a mud-farmer from Monty Python, supping gruel in their tiny hovel. Rome in particular, for much of Antiquity, was a filthy industrial slum, in which workers were crammed into dangerous, run down, overcrowded insula rife with plague and disease, and fire and hunger were common occurences. In comparison, the average size of the 5th and 6th century houses excavated in Mucking, Essex are roughly equivalent in size to an average British semi-detached.

I would argue it's a significant reach to say that Classical mythology is somehow "better" than Christianity. After all, there are about 2.4 billion Christians in the world today, while you'd be hard-pressed to find an active follower of Aphrodite or Sulis-Minerva. Not to mention that a significant part of the global population is about to celebrate Christmas. That's not to say that Classical mythology is worse, because you can't really put an objective value on religion. Or culture for that matter. Which means we have to discuss literature and literacy. Estimating the extent to which literacy was prevalent in a historical society without educational records can be very tricky, especially when you account for differences between 'functional literacy' (could read a sign, sign a name, perhaps write a few words) and full literacy (comfortable reading and writing). Either way, it's almost certain that the 'rich literature' and 'vibrant philosophy' of the Classical period was limited almost entirely to the elites. Indeed Harris and Wright estimate that literacy rates in the Classical world are unlikely to have exceded 20%; likely being around 10% in the Roman Empire (dropping to around 5% in the West), and as low as 5% in Classical-period Greece. By contrast, Sylvia Thrupp estimates that around 50% of the population of Medieval London were English literate, and as high as 40% Latin literate. Indeed, the high number of extant Anglo-Saxon manuscripts suggests that Early Medieval Old English literacy - or at least functional literacy - was relatively high. Again, though, we return to a notion that 'cultures' are mutually exclusive entities which can somehow be deemed materially superior or inferior on an objective scale. What makes The Aeneid a better work of literature than Beowulf or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales? The Canterbury Tales are certainly funnier.