How Hegsethian heroes destroyed themselves and their entire civilisation

I haven’t yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod’s Intrusion where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the mysterious “city burners” responsible for the massive destruction of cities in the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE.

Following this up, I learned that the periodization I was taught in school had been totally abandoned over the second half of the 20th century. In that story, the Bronze Age was succeeded by the technologically superior Iron Age. Progress continued until Roman decadence led to barbarian invasion and the Dark Ages, now more neutrally described as the Early Middle Ages.

Instead, the end of the Bronze Age was followed by a centuries-long Dark Age, with regression much more complete than after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Greek civilisation, centred on the Mycenaean palace culture, collapsed almost completely, to the extent that writing was completely lost. Homer’s account of the Bronze Age was written centuries after the event, and with nothing but oral tradition to go on.

Obvious candidates for the cause were the mysterious Sea Peoples, whom the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III claimed to have defeated around 1187 BCE. This claim was discovered in the 19th century, hadn’t been much discussed outside Egyptology (a point made by Emily Wilson in her highly critical review). In the film, Odysseus admits to his wife that “we are the Sea People” and foreshadows the Bronze Age collapse.

More recent scholarship sees the city burners, whoever they were, as secondary causes of a collapse induced by, and reinforcing, the breakdown of the complex economic structures required by the need for copper and tin to produce bronze. Bronze weapons and armour were the central requirement of the aristocratic warrior class represented by the Acheans at Troy. Climate change, always a suspect in civilisational collapse, also appears as a possible cause.

The eventual emergence of iron as a cheap (though initially inferior) replacement ended the era of the heroic warrior. Iron weaponry produced something analogous to the modern mass army, in which the entire male citizen class was expected to serve (Socrates, for example, was an Athenian hoplite, noted for bravery).

All of this is directly opposite to the pop culture of the American manosphere. Rome wasn’t brought down by the decadence of Nero and Caligula but by the shift of power to what is now Istanbul centuries later. The Hegsethian heroes described by Homer either destroyed their own society (a reading perfectly consistent with the endings of the Iliad and Odyssey) or were brought down by their failure to manage the economy and the environment.

Add in an absurd misreading of Thucydides’ Melian dialogue, and you have the MAGA theory of history.

fn1. I have now, but I wrote this first and saw no need to change it