About 3,300 years ago, in the region around the Mediterranean, civilization collapsed. That’s what the archaeological record shows: the spectacular disappearance of a number of thriving cultures in Greece, Anatolia, and the Middle East. The Minoan palaces, with their astonishing frescoes of acrobats jumping over bulls, fell into ruins. Cyprus, at the crossroads of late Bronze Age culture, suffered a series of devastating attacks. Powerful Egypt was hobbled.
Perhaps the most famous destruction, however, took place at the city of Troy, which was part of the Hittite empire that stretched across modern-day Turkey. The fall of Troy is, of course, the subject of the two great works of ancient Greek poetry: the Iliad and the Odyssey . Composed sometime between 725 and 675 BC, or nearly half a millennium after the events they describe, the works attributed to the blind poet Homer recount the decade-long Greek siege of Troy, the clever ploy developed by Odysseus to smuggle soldiers into the city by way of a “gift” of a massive wooden horse, and then the 10-year journey of Odysseus back to his wife and child in Ithaca.
What the books do not detail is what ultimately happened to the conquerors after the sack of Troy. The Mycenaean civilization—the disparate Greek city-states that united at the end of the Bronze Age to sail against Troy in the Iliad —suffered the same fate as the great city of Priam and Hector. Athens, Thebes, Pylos: they all became rubble. It was only in Homer’s time that Greece was able to make a comeback.
The culprits responsible for the collapse of Troy are well-known. But what about the other civilizations? Inscriptions from late Bronze Age Egypt mention a mysterious “sea people” marauding through the region and destroying the great cities of Hatti, Ugarit, and Ascalon. The people of the sea very nearly bring down the Egyptians as well but are defeated in two epic battles. Weakened by war and other factors, Egypt goes into decline.
These “sea people” figure prominently in Christopher Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey . As Odysseus makes his way back to Ithaca, he encounters rumors that these mysterious marauders have put everyone up and down the coast on alert. At a key moment in the film, Odysseus comes to a startling realization. Reflecting on the pillage of Troy and his voyage of slaughter back home to Ithaca, Odysseus understands that he and his fellow Greeks are, in fact, the notorious sea people.
It is a supremely ahistorical gloss on the source text. The Mycenean Greeks, after all, were also victims of the “sea people.” The Iliad, rather than mourn the bloodshed, celebrates the Greek victory over Troy. In the Odyssey , the eponymous character seems to show little if any regret about his role in the city’s destruction. Indeed, he seems to have little regard for the consequences of any of his actions, an obtuseness parodied to great effect by a tart-tongued Penelope in the Natalie Haynes novel A Thousand Ships .
But Nolan was not aiming for historical or literary accuracy. It would have been a fool’s errand, in any case. He was making a film about a poetic retelling of a legend whose details had been tumbled and polished by innumerable bards over the centuries. Much of the controversy around the film, fueled by the “anti-woke” polemics of the far right, have focused on the casting. Should Nolan have found a Greek actor instead of Matt Damon to play Odysseus? How to cast the goddess Athena or even the famed beauty Helen who was the offspring of a god and a mortal? Are there really any actors out there with a single eye in the middle of their forehead who could have pulled off the role of Cyclops?
Modern historians no longer think that the “sea people” were solely responsible for the decline of so many powerful entities. Probably climate change played a role , with drought pushing regions to their ecological limits and prompting people to take to the sea in search of fertile land. But Nolan was not interested in making a documentary about the late Bronze Age collapse of Troy and other cities. Rather, he was inspired by the gaps in the historical record. “The people from the sea are essentially these marauders who some believe brought about the collapse of civilization, but nobody knows their lost history,” Nolan told Vulture . “Nobody knows who they were, and there’s not a lot of information about it. There’s a lot of speculation.”
Like any good filmmaker, Nolan had an axe to grind. In designing an epic anti-war film, he turned Odysseus from a trickster into a brooder. The man behind the Trojan Horse, like the subject of Nolan’s Oppenheimer , has developed second thoughts about his great technological breakthrough. Odysseus looks upon the rape and pillage of Troy, brought about by the trick of the Trojan Horse, much as Oppenheimer considered the consequences of the atomic bomb he helped develop. Both technologies were used to end long conflicts; both technologies stir regret on the part of their creators. After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer confessed to President Harry Truman that he, like the other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, had blood on his hands .
Nolan’s Odysseus goes one step further. During the 10-year voyage home portrayed in the film, he mourns not only the men under his command who have died but also the victims of the assault on Troy. In the film, even his dispatch of the suitors who have been trying to win his wife Penelope’s hand is bound up with his contrition for previous lives lost. In a substantial departure from the text, Nolan sends his protagonist at the end of the film into exile with his wife to atone for the deaths of his fighting companions.
Much is made in the film about the violation of xenia , or the hospitality that one must show to foreigners. This divine law is upheld by Penelope back in Ithaca when she hosts all the scheming suitors, though several years of eating and drinking at their host’s expense must surely violate the statute of limitations on hospitality. Odysseus, meanwhile, flouts the law with his Trojan Horse, though surely a war requires the suspension of any rule requiring that hospitality be accorded to men with weapons.
For Nolan’s purposes, however, xenia is a necessary counterpoint to xenophobia, the hatred of strangers that pervades contemporary culture. A little more xenia and a lot less xenophobia, the filmmaker suggests with his script and his multicultural casting, would perhaps forestall the collapse of civilization toward which the world is spinning. War, the ultimate violation of hospitality shown to foreigners, is not an opportunity in the film to gain glory but just the accumulation of dead bodies and blood-stained treasure.
Nolan is nodding at the headline news. In today’s environment, America, Russia, and Israel have all used epic rationales for their murderous misdeeds. Russia is defending its civilization, Israel is seeking revenge for a surprise attack, and America is in search of lost greatness. They have identified the dangerous marauders as terrorists of one stripe or another: Hamas, Hezbollah, Venezuelans on boats, Iranian mullahs, Ukrainian Nazis.
These “heroic” nations have produced Iliads and Iliads of press releases, tweets, and self-serving propaganda. But a self-aware Odysseus, like the one portrayed by Nolan, is much harder to find. Dissenting Russians have gone into exile. A handful of politicians have stood up to the U.S. war machine. It’s the rare Israeli who challenges the colonial mindset of Zionism. Such a world could certainly use more leaders who step down in order to go on a global apology tour.
Nolan ends on a hopeful note about the fall and rise of civilizations. Yes, the Bronze Age will come to an end, but then there will be Homer and the glories of Athens just a few hundred years later. It’s reassuring to be reminded that although civilizations come and go, history and humanity soldier on.
But here’s the thing: the Greeks didn’t have nukes. Today, civilizations can disappear just like Troy. But, after Oppenheimer, there’s a chance that they might not come back.
The post We Are the Marauders appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus .