Aesthetics in the classics...a subject looking for a reason to be?

This is a very interestingand learned review of a volume devoted to Greek and Roman Aesthetics. The review argues that "The field of classics is witnessing a kind of resuscitation via defibrillation in the area of aesthetics...The contemporary revival of aesthetics is a laudable project." As the review notes the zenith of a certain kind of philosophic engagement with aesthetics was "the great, principally German, tradition of art historical and literary historical criticism, underpinned by a broad reading in aesthetic philosophy." The reviewer is puzzled by why this tradition "began to fade [within classics] after around 1950." Surely, this demise has little to do with an argument by Kristeller (as the reviewer kind of realizes), and everything to do with the fact that the idea that aesthetics was a way to contemplate the divine in the absence of God -- the motivating thought behind the tradition the reviewer admires so much -- had started to look, well, ridiculous? Not to mention that all the nationalist myths that  the supposedly great German philological tradition had incorporated had become, ahum, distasteful?