The Late Bronze Age collapse wasn't caused by barbarians or decadence. New scholarship points to the heroic warrior class itself as the agent of ruin.
A new film adaptation of The Odyssey has revived an old debate among historians: what really caused the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE? The film nods to one theory – that the mysterious "Sea Peoples" were actually Greek warriors who sacked cities across the Eastern Mediterranean before returning home.
That reading lines up with a view that has gained ground among scholars over the past few decades. The collapse of Mycenaean palace culture was so total that writing itself vanished from Greece for centuries. Homer's epics, composed 400 years later, preserved only fragments of the Bronze Age world through oral tradition.
The old narrative – that the Bronze Age gave way to a technologically superior Iron Age – has been discarded. In its place historians describe a Dark Age that was far more regressive than the period after Rome's fall. The economic structures needed to produce bronze, which depended on long-distance trade routes for copper and tin, broke down. Climate change may have accelerated the process.
What replaced bronze was iron, initially inferior but widely available. Iron weapons enabled a different kind of warfare. Instead of the aristocratic chariot warrior celebrated in the Iliad, Greek city-states fielded hoplite armies drawn from the male citizen class. Athens required every citizen to serve; Socrates fought as a hoplite at Potidaea and Delium.
This cuts directly against the pop-history narrative circulating in parts of the American right. The Hegsethian heroes described by Homer, on the evidence of the scholarship, did not fall to decadence or barbarian invasion. They either destroyed their own society from within or were brought down by their failure to manage the economy and the environment. The ending of the Odyssey supports a reading in which the hero himself is complicit in the ruin.
Emily Wilson, in a critical review of the film, noted that the Sea Peoples theory was long confined to Egyptology before being picked up by popular culture. Ramesses III claimed to have defeated them around 1187 BCE, a claim discovered in the 19th century and only recently re-entering the mainstream.
The MAGA theory of history, built on an absurd misreading of Thucydides' Melian dialogue and a nostalgic view of aristocratic warriors, turns out to describe a civilisation that collapsed under its own weight.
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