That has never been the definition of a recession. All recessions are declared by NBER and NBER has always used a large number of metrics in their calculations. You can see the official list of "peak months" and "trough months" here, and you'll note they don't line up cleanly with 2 quarters of negative growth:
The ancient Greeks did not define a recession as two quarters of negative growth— that has never been the definition of a recession, even if you go back several thousand years.
So how do we know they had a recession? If the definition its only a recession if NBER says so you would have to assert that they did not. Have historians have been disseminating Russian disinformation for centuries?
Before 1800, and especially before 1500, the monetary economy was so small, and the barter economy was so large, that these economies did not have recessions as we understand them today. A modern recession, as we've understood them for the last 200 years, can only exist in a society that has largely converted all economic activity to the monetary economy, and thereby made it vulnerable to the money cycle. If you're interested in the emergence and development of the monetary economy the best books ever written on the topic are Fernand Braudel's history:
https://www.nber.org/research/data/us-business-cycle-expansi...