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
{ 35 comments }
D. S. Battistoli 08.11.26 at 9:21 am
In parts of West Africa and its diaspora, as well as several parts of Europe, it is common to pin money to the clothing of a person celebrating their birthday or a wedding, during which practice the person receiving the gifts should usually wear an expression on their face as if they would rather be anywhere else in the world at all.
Emily Wilson’s Highsmith-humored reaction in the London Review of Books to the event that led her to become the fastest-selling translator of Homer in history immediately put me in mind of this response to receiving windfalls.
Matt 08.11.26 at 9:54 am
I think this is pretty much right, and agree with it, but think this part is worth just a bit of elaboration: 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)
Hoplites were at least relatively more well-too-do, as you had to provide your own armor and weapons, and they were not really cheap. (The really wealthy provided horses and boats, though it took a while before calvary tactics became really important.) More common people served as Peltasts, who had small, light, shields, little or no armor, and mostly used javelins and slings. (Because peltasts threw things at the other side, it would be nice if the verb “to pelt” came from them, but a brief look seems to suggest this isn’t so.) While not as glamourous as the hoplites, both Thucydides and Herodotus describe the peltasts as being pretty important in a lot of battles.
steven t johnson 08.11.26 at 2:05 pm
It is customary among a certain sort to dismiss any collapse of any civilization as an optical illusion, whereby the demise of a tyrannical urban culture is actually a boon to humanity, which presumably has come to its senses and everybody has gone camping.
I don’t know whether this is some sort of high-brown anarchist chic (James C. Scott?) or an unconscious assumption that a Dark Age has to look like Hollywood fantasies of zombie apocalypse. Not all civilizations collapsed c. 1200. It was after all Egyptian boasting about how they won that gives rise to the notion the Sea Peoples dunnit. There is no doubt in my mind that the disappearance of the various Mycenean cities (who were not even an empire?) and the Hittites (who were) marked a population decline and a loss of material culture on all levels, not only for elites. Ugarit for one disappeared but Byblos for one did not. To me that unevenness, lack of universality is the norm.
So far as the usual use of the term Dark Ages, that seems to be used as a synonym for Middle Ages, or maybe now early Middle Ages. This strikes me as nonsense. First, the collapse was in the western Roman Empire, not the eastern. Second, the true Dark Ages might be said to sun from roughly 400 AD (CE if you insist) to 800. Charlemagne’s empire gets us into early Middle Ages in my opinion. [To make it worse, what most people tend to think of as medieval seems to date mostly to what are often called the High Middle Ages, the eleventh and twelfth centuries.]
As I said I’m not altogether certain how people have managed to convince themselves that things were peachy in western Europe in the fifth century. Maybe some of this is a reaction to the preposterous myths about effete Romans toppled in a night by manly barbarians? The idea being you combat this reactionary propaganda by denying there was even a fall of the western empire?
Tim H. 08.11.26 at 3:53 pm
The subtitle suggests that neo-facism won’t be the destination of contemporary conservatism, but the prelude to the accelerated decline of the West. Hopefully, not punctuated by nuclear conflict.
MisterMr 08.11.26 at 4:17 pm
My understanding is that the society of the achean warrior princes described by Homer is indeed a post collapse society, given that the collapse didn’t happen overnight the Trojan war did happen likely in the collapse period.
The “Sea people” though were likely a very diverse group of populations, not just the Acheans.
marcel proust 08.11.26 at 11:23 pm
MisterMr: Eric Cline, author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed would disagree about the time span of the collapse. Further, if the Trojan War indeed happened, the dates in Wikipedia range from about 150 years earlier to just a few years earlier. to about 40 years later.
marcel proust 08.11.26 at 11:23 pm
to just a few years earlier.MisterMr 08.12.26 at 5:38 am
@marcel proust
I’m not an expert on the subject, what I understand of the bronze Age collapse comes mostly from this post from Brett Deveraux.
It seems that Greek palatial economies cracked first and hardest, and this might have started the collapse of others; in this logic the Acheans of the Trojan war would be raiders coming from a just recently collapsed Greece. From Deveraux:
Those collapses in turn begin to disrupt trade but also produce outward movements of refugees and/or raiders, which may in part be what is being ‘remembered’ in Homer’s account of the Trojan War or the broader Greek mythological assumption that the Trojan War marks the end of the ‘Age of Heroes’ (which is how the Classical Greeks understood this period).
That said, it seems to me that the society described in the Iliad and the Odyssey Is not a palace economy, so I guess that Homer described a slightly later, post collapse society.
Jim Buck 08.12.26 at 6:44 am
@D.S. Battistoli
I wonder if Watson has seen that other revenant movie: Marty Supreme? Timothée Chalamet’s characterisation nails much of what’s elided by Nolan’s scraping of Homer. Marty is tense and hysterical, an unscrupulous, trickster out to a make a name—any name as long as it is not the name his mother birthed him into; at the end of the film, Marty trees that name as foundational to his identity as a father who refuses to kiss pigs.
Jim Buck 08.12.26 at 6:59 am
Correction: I’m mixing up Wilson with Emily Watson there.
Tm 08.12.26 at 11:50 am
I found some of Wilson’s criticism a tad pedantic (of course Nolan left some things out from the original Odyssee) but much of it quite correctly observed. The movie does indeed little to humanize the victims of war, and it’s anti-war message at the end – which I think the film does convey well in that scene – is countered right away by the obvious relish with which Damon massacres the suitors. But I’ll be interested to read different takes if anybody has suggestions of seriously argued reviews?
D. S. Battistoli 08.12.26 at 3:21 pm
Jim Buck @10 & Tm @11:
I think Wilson was in an impossible position that she could only have escaped had she decided to write no review for publication at all. If she produced a review that extended to Nolan’s films standard principles of charity, it might have come out rather well, given how it has done when other critics have reviewed it with charitable consideration. Then, given the very public credit Nolan gave to her translation, she might seem to be dancing on the graves of prior translators, chopping money and singing along with MC Hammer, “Can’t touch this! Aaaal‘xander Pope! Can’t touch this! Rohhhbert Fagles! Can’t touch this!”
So she talked about all the things the movie did, without seriously considering how it might have held together when it didn’t hold together she would like her Homer to hang together.
As for unscrupulousness, that’s a challenging attribute to analyze with regard to tricksters. The Roman Ulysses often came across as immoral, while Odysseus was just a smarter trickster than your standard Bronze-age trickster. I see him as a Joe Dimaggio in a Stephen-Jay-Gouldian early-league Full House trick-capacity distribution, and this is why he risks being hard to portray on film. Odysseus’ “Noman” ruse against Polyphemus works when you can imagine there being otherwise non-comic people who might fall for it. Instead, Nolan uses Matt Damon much as he used him in Interstellar: to play a character for whom you initially feel a great deal of sympathy and around whom you enjoy spending time, but who at the end of their arc seems to be the agent of much of the film’s needless suffering.
That is very likely not what Homer was doing. But it enables reads like John Q’s here. And being ornery and seemingly blind to it enables Wilson to be the sort of person she, admirably, seems to aspire to be: a sweat-er of the small stuff who likes what she can take from Homer as much as or more than her readers like what they can take from her translations.
Alex SL 08.12.26 at 10:15 pm
Often the discourse on civilisational collapse is focused on what we can learn for our own times from past collapses. However, one can also flip that around. What we are currently faced with is several sometimes connected but sometimes distinct accelerating crises all converging on us: overpopulation, fossil fuels and resulting global warming, unsustainable use of resources, among which in particular groundwater extraction, soil erosion, and phosphate mining deserve special mention, increasing levels of inequality and concentration of wealth, biodiversity loss, saturation of the environment with microplastics, forever chemicals, and hormones, to the degree that untreated rainwater is not formally safe to drink anywhere on the planet, with obvious implications for wild animals and plants.
If I use our current predicament as a model for past collapses, it seems logical to me that the search for the one factor that caused the decline of Rome or the end of the bronze age civilisations is futile because it is likely to have been several converging crises. In the case of the bronze age civilisations defined very broadly, at least the following appear to be well documented: soil salinisation in Mesopotamia and erosion in Greece, both from unsustainable agricultural practices (and this may be why Egypt survived: the yearly Nile floods gave them a more sustainable basis than Mesopotamian irrigation systems); drying up of rivers in India; and the volcanic explosion that may have triggered the end of the Minoans.
As an aside, I am similarly puzzled as steven t johnson. It seems very fashionable now to reject the concept of a ‘dark age’ to the degree of denying that there really was any decline. They invented stirrups, so progress was uninterrupted! But anybody comparing early Medieval art with Roman art should recognise that those are very different levels of achievement, and that is before contemplating the collapse of the trade networks of Roman times, the loss of aqueducts, canalisation, and road building techniques, the decline in governmental complexity from senate and imperial administration to warlordism, and the shrinking of populations.
Jim Buck 08.13.26 at 7:15 am
Odysseus, Polyphemus, and Rumpelstiltskin. I think you are right, about Nolan’s terrific, terrifying Polyphemus; it is Goya rather than Homer and humour and sex find no purchase. Again Marty Supreme is more faithful to the original; if Marty’s ambitions are to survive he must suffer whatever contingent humiliation arises; so, the Cyclops that temporarily unmans Marty has its provenance not in Goya but in a goy antisemites who delights in torturing a dependent Jew . Marty is no-manned to the point of bending for a bare-arsed spanking, before meekly filing onto the boss’s corporate jet with the other corporate sheep. The hero’s potential for fatherhood is unlocked and restored only when he sticks it back to the boss in Odysseus’s traditional style.
Tm 08.13.26 at 7:21 am
I get it that people found Wilson’s review unusually harsh, although harsh reviews even of very successful films are by no means unusual. I think an equally harsh review from a regular film critic wouldn’t have evoked that kind of backlash. But then it wouldn’t have been remotely as well informed.
What I’m interested to know is whether there are responses to Wilson that are actually taking seriously what she’s saying? Because it’s not true that her criticism is simply “it’s not Homer any more”. Her criticism is explicitly that the film doesn’t “hang together” on its own terms, “the film’s own values and vision don’t hang together”, “the characters’ motivations don’t make sense on their own terms”, “the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas”, “the film wants to have it both ways”, ” It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth” etc. These charges can of course be disputed but an argument has to be made. I found myself more agreeing than disagreeing. It’s not quite clear to me why the film has such a good reception as something more than an action film.
marcel proust 08.13.26 at 2:10 pm
MisterMr: Thanks for the Brett Deveraux link. That was interesting.
John Q 08.13.26 at 6:55 pm
The recent rejection of the Dark Age idea has several sources. First, it’s very much a Western Europe, and most particularly, English thing. The Romans pulled out of England, and their civilisation went with them. For English historians looking back, there was hardly anything visible, just some names of people who might or might not be real – Vortigern, Arthur and so on. The further east you go, the less this is true/
Second, people who study a field always fall in love with to some extent, and naturally want to stress its importance.
Finally, there’s the dominant orthodoxy of anti-presentism which I discussed in a number of posts here https://crookedtimber.org/2022/01/09/in-defense-of-presentism/
Alex SL 08.13.26 at 9:28 pm
John Q,
It seems to me that there are two additional aspects at play:
First, the generous application of both strawmanning the opposing view and motte-and-baileying one’s own, and second, the tendency of many people to go to the opposite extreme of what they reject. It is reasonable to reject a dark age in the alleged sense of “there are no documents from that time because nearly everybody forgot to write”, the problem with that is only that I am unaware of anybody serious who made that claim or defined the dark ages like that*. It is not reasonable to then go to the opposite extreme of denying that any collapse or decline happened at all.
*) I am not a historian, so I could be completely on the wrong track here. The claim in online circles seems to be that dark age means age without records, in the sense of communications to the future going dark. But I always assumed it just meant the bad times, in the same vein as enlightenment means times are getting good again, light vs. dark as analogy for good vs. bad. Part of this may be that there is no Dunkelzeit in German; Germans seem to conceptualise the English term dark ages as (part of the) early middle ages, and “middle” seems quite clearly intended to mean the meh time between two cycles of high cultural complexity.
MisterMr 08.13.26 at 10:16 pm
My two cents of the Dark Ages: the concept comes from Francesco Petrarca Who, around 1350, being a latin studying humanist, realized that there was and ancient age of developement, a present (1350) age of developement, and an “age in the middle” of ignorance. From this whe get the term “middle ages” and the implicit idea that it was a dark age.
However: this makes sense for Italy, that was the center of the empire in roman times and the starting point of renaissance later, but doesn’t make sense e.g. for Ireland or Morocco or eastern Germany, so depending on where you look the concept makes more or less sense.
Also the dates are fuzzy: when I was in high school the middle ages where from 476 to 1496, which is much later than when Petrarch believed the new age of reason started.
Plus, with new, better archeolological data we now know that the fall started earlier (300), accelerated around 500, and reached a nadir around 800. Logically the years between 800 and 1000 should still count as dark since the economy was in upswing but still sucked, but if one looks at the direction and not at the level one still sees growth, so the only period that perfectly corresponds to the concept of “dark ages” Is from 500 to 800, which is a small part of the 1000 years that usually are called “middle ages”, so people Who for some reason dislike the label have and easy way tò pretend it didn’t happen (Graeber in Debt minimised it a lot for example).
JPL 08.13.26 at 11:43 pm
D.S. Battistoli @12:
“So she talked about all the things the movie did, without seriously considering how it might have held together when it didn’t hold together she would like her Homer to hang together.”
That’s an odd sentence. I’m not able to interpret it as expressing a coherent proposition. Can you possibly express your intended thought in another way? (With a sentence just about as brief; I’m not looking for an explanation. I wouldn’t have commented if it looked like one of the usual internet infelicities. Inserting a semicolon before the last clause would at least make it coherent, but I don’t know if that would sufficiently express your intended thought.)
You mention J Buck’s odd comparison of Nolan’s Odysseus to a trickster character. When I think of proper tricksters I think of characters like Anansi. I haven’t yet seen the film, but it seems to me that would be kind of a stretch. They seem nothing like each other as characters.
When I do see it, I’m not going to expect a faithful retelling of the Odysseus myth, but a probably grandiose story about our current predicament in an age of mass forgetting of intuitive moral knowledge accumulated since the “collapse” of the system of moral understanding Odysseus was responding to. What interests me is the difference between the system of moral understanding of Homer’s time and that of today. How did our current one get constructed? (Sadly, I’m not interested in the spectacle of battles and loud noises.)
PatinIowa 08.14.26 at 1:16 am
It’s understandable that LRB asked Wilson to review the film, if they initiated the process. She’s been writing on translation and classics for them for two decades and her translation was attacked when it came out, by many of the same people who attacked Nolan’s film before they saw it. I don’t think they anticipated the amount of attention the review got. I do think they thought they’d attract readers and maybe pick up some subscribers.
It seems to me that her negative review had two functions. As Tm said above, she had problems with the film, problems that have been echoed by other reviewers to one degree or another. So she wrote a review.
It’s also the case that Nolan name-checked her. And that’s what I think accounts for her asperity. This is speculative psychoanalysis from a distance, so take it for what it’s worth: I read her review not so much as “It’s not Homer,” or “it’s a bad film,” but “If the film doesn’t ring true to you, don’t blame my translation.”
There have been intelligent (and more measured) reviews from other classicists, none a rave. The first paragraph of A.E. Stallings’s review in TLS is worth savouring:
“In the past week, I enjoyed two movies at Athens’s outdoor summer cinemas …. One, a masterpiece of clarity and pacing, on a huge screen, featured a clever stranger/sea captain arriving from the east at a farmstead, shrugging off the coils of a manipulative blonde goddess to be with an independent and clever heiress who is beset by sinister locals and an unwelcome suitor after her property. Outnumbered and in peril, the perfectly matched pair communicate their thoughts by flashing glances, and the culminating shootout, which could result in decades of vendetta violence between families, through a twist, miraculously results in peace and a new beginning. The other film was Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.”
I have to say that my second viewing of the film, during which I ignored the plot as best I could, and gave myself over to the photography and especially the soundtrack was far more enjoyable than the first.
J-D 08.14.26 at 3:00 am
I have not read Mahomet Et Charlemagne (Muhammad And Charlemagne) by the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, but a quick look at his Wikipedia page not only confirms my recollection of what I understood from what I read about it to be its basic thesis but also mentions a recent confirmatory analysis: the conquests of the early Islamic caliphate did much more to disrupt Mediterranean trading networks than the end of Roman rule in the West, and thus much more to contribute to a general economic, civic, administrative and intellectual decline. This means (and is supported by the evidence that) the greatest decline happened (roughly) not in the fifth and sixth centuries but in the seventh and eighth centuries.
This also resonates with the preference of many scholars now to treat that period (that is, roughly, the fifth and sixth centuries), or at least part of it, or at least in some regions, not as part of ‘Early Medieval’ but as part of ‘Late Antiquity’. For a while there, even after Roman rule disappeared from large regions, other aspects of the culture persisted to a significant extent.
By definition, the areas that remained under Roman rule (what moderns, but not they themselves, call the Byzantine Empire) didn’t experience effects of the end of that rule, at least not directly; but that doesn’t mean they weren’t affected (although possibly to a lesser extent?) by disruptions caused by the conquering Caliphate.
In all contexts and on all theories, ‘Early Medieval’ is a less tendentious description than ‘Dark Ages’, and I think both historians and others have become more cautious about using tendentious language, which on balance is a good thing.
engels 08.15.26 at 11:19 am
The more I hear about the Nolan film, the less I want to see it. It can’t be worse than Dunkirk I suppose.
D. S. Battistoli 08.15.26 at 1:40 pm
JPL @19
That sentence bugged me after I hit submit, too! I had meant to type, “So she talked about all the things the movie did, without seriously considering how it might have held together when it didn’t hold together in the way she would like her Homer to hang together.”
You’re right that tricksters in Greek mythology are not treated the same as those, like Anansi, in West African folk tales. I imagine that I might be landing somewhere between Jim Buck and you on this one, seeing Odysseus as a Greek-style trickster, but not necessarily “unscrupulous.”
Tm @15 & PatinIowa @20
I get that Wilson writes book reviews, and while she may be offered a movie review opportunity, I would not accord her review of a movie any more weight than I would accord a film critic’s review of translations of Akutagawa’s Rashomon, Suzuki’s Ringu, Krabbé’s Het Gouden Ei (known to anglophones as The Vanishing), or Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate, even if the film critic had earlier reviewed the movie adaptations of those works.
That said, I loved Wilson’s review, which I read in the tradition of poison pen criticism; by the end of the first paragraph, she’s made it clear that taking the piss out of not just the movie under consideration, but Nolan’s whole filmography and “families” (or, as the closing paragraph would have it, fans of Tom Holland) who might enjoy it. It reminded me of Ninety-Two Days, Evelyn Waugh’s book-length slagging of Guyana, which I found a thrillingly cruel pleasure, if one that did not persuade me of its authors ideas of its subject.
For Wilson’s essay, part of the problem is that I would like to have words and phrases that can help describe the 2004 movie Troy, and with Wilson having applied so many of the most apt ones to Nolan’s Odyssey, I feel myself painted into a linguistic corner. More my problem than hers, certainly.
I would quite enjoy to see her further develop her points about how hard it is for movies (and, perhaps implicitly, audiences) to really picture an interventionist and literally sensible polytheistic universe. I think even many people who think they understand such cosmologies (readers of the YA book Children of Blood & Bone, perhaps?), actually don’t, not as well as Wilson does.
And finally, I do love that Stallings quote. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has got to be one of the greatest films of all time, made anywhere. Giving her readers an opportunity to reflect on it? It’s a light thrill of a gift, as generous to your readers as prose can get.
Jim Buck 08.15.26 at 3:20 pm
JPL@ 19
I am well-acquainted with the tales of Anansi the Spider; indeed he does exceed Odysseus in repertoire de trickery. Yet Odysseus (under that name or in the Roman styling: Ulysses) has definite form:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GreekMythology/comments/18mchov/source_for_odysseus_feigning_insanity/
steven t johnson 08.17.26 at 2:35 pm
J-D@22 The word “medieval” is in much of the popular imaginary highly tendentious in itself, with very much the same connotations as “dark ages.” The popular imaginary appears to be incorrigible, perhaps because screenwriters? The trend for many historians to deny that anything bad happened in the western Roman empire c. 400 to 800 I suspect comes from another motive than caution about the use of language.
For SF fans, the Pirenne thesis that it was the Muslims who dunnit can be matched by L. Sprague deCamp’s Lest Darkness Fall, which asserts it was Justinian who was the malefactor, by imagining an improved version of history where the Ostrogoths win bigly. (Completists can compare and contrast Harry Turtledove’s implicit defense of the Byzantine potential in Agent of Byzantium.) But my understanding at this point suggests that some of the deep roots of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance (it’s a fact that some call it that!) lie in Muslim Spain. This seems incompatible with Pirenne’s recasting of the Muslims as the real barbarians instead of the Franks et al.
MisterMr 08.17.26 at 8:18 pm
About Pirenne, I actually read Mohammed and Charlemagne a lot of years ago (also the Cities in the Middle Ages IIRC). The introduction of my edition explained that Pirenne was in strong disagreement with a german nationalist cultural trend in his times, that said that the roman empire collapsed because it was corrupt but then the younger, purer german blood that came created a new civilisation.
These beliefs were linked to german nationalism and years later became part of the general nazi view of history (though not everyone who had these ideas was a nazi, and german nationalism started much earlier than nazism).
Anyway, Pirenne’s main axe to grind was that he believed that the various germanic populòations didn’t really create a new culture, so he emphasized the continuity between the late roman empire and the early romano-barbaric kingdoms (roughly from 500 to 800).
As a consequence, Pirenne had to emphasize big time the effect of the closing of the mediterranean trading routes by the arabs, in some cases to the limit of becoming anti-arab (I vaguely remember one sentence where he said that while christians killed muslims, muslims let christians live in muslim lands but paying some tribute, but for some reason the muslims where more “insidious” than the christians).
Pirenne’s son was killed by the germans in WW1 and then he himself spent two years in a german camp, so he had some good reasons to be pissed by the Germans when he later wrote Mohammed and Charlemagne.
I think Pirenne was a very important historian and that he was in part right (the continuity between late roman empire and early romano-barbaric kingdoms is strong in many places), but he strongly overstated his thesis.
J-D 08.18.26 at 6:49 am
I am interested in reading your comment, especially as you have read the book whereas I have not. Even without reading the book, I come to the discussion aware that the idea that he strongly overstated his thesis (whatever exactly it was) is the kind of thing which might be true (easily).
Somebody pointed out earlier in this discussion (correctly) that major historical developments are seldom if ever a product of a single cause. The reasonable thing to guess, just on general principles, is that life for people in the parts of western Europe which were formerly under Roman imperial rule changed after (and as a result of) the end of imperial rule but also that life in those same regions (and in others) also changed further after (and as a result of) disruption to former trade routes resulting from the early Islamic conquests around the Mediterranean.
Jonathan 08.18.26 at 9:03 am
Dont know anything about the his-story featured in the various comments – and could not give a cross-eyed fart about any of it.
But I do find the very humanizing aspects/dilemmas involved in Odysseus’s “home-coming” featured in this unique review to be quite illuminating.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/review.asp?article=24118
It is titled The Impossible Homecoming -the author is Sam Ben-Meir.
Sam is one of the very few authors featured on the Online Opinion website worth reading. Most/all of the rest of them are worse than awful!
Jonathan 08.18.26 at 9:16 am
Third attempt at providing the correct url
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=24118
steven t johnson 08.18.26 at 4:35 pm
MisterMr@27 I did not know that about Pirenne personally. As for his claim of a continuity of the early Romano-barbaric kingdoms? The real world example of change and continuity in Roman empire was of course the eastern empire, which changed so much we have to call it “Byzantine.” Those supposed continuators of the western empire failed to continue the population and production, and broke up. So far as I can tell, that failure to successfully continue the material substance underlying the western empire is precisely why those would-be successors failed to create a new culture. Pirenne seems to me to have been correct on that point.
But if Pirenne thought there was some sort of continuity between the likes of Stilicho and Odoacer and Aetius and Syagrius et al., and Charlemagne, well those were good drugs! And I still suspect the greatest continuity in the west was probably in Spain, precisely because, Muslims, instead of new influxes such as Lombards. Perhaps it’s my ignorance but I can’t see much continiuty between the late western empire and Clovis.
John Q 08.18.26 at 6:55 pm
Jonathan @29 I didn’t realise Online Opinion still existed. It’s run by a Brisbane rightwinger, with whom I’ve had a few run-ins. Back in the primordial days of blogging, when we were all in it together, I published there occasionally.
MisterMr 08.19.26 at 12:44 pm
So I watched the Odyssey and I think that it’s done very well scene by scene, but the imposition of modern themes on the story is too heavy handed. I have also some problems with the “all girls good, all boys bad” approach, but that is perhaps for another time.
But in the meanwhile, I played a bit with ChatGPT and produced a pair of interesting graphs about european population in the middle ages in Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain and Spain, so I’ll go on with the slightly OT subtread about the middle ages.
These are the estimates from 200 to 1600 CE.
All the countries have a population fall between 400 and 900, however Italy and France are very big, GB and Spain are very low, Germany starts low but ends very big.
So it makes sense to give more weight to what happened in France and Italy in the early middle ages, and the evolution in Germany later.
By the way around year 800 there were two agricultural revolutions in europe, one in crop rotation and another a change in the shape of the yoke that made it possible to use horses to pull the plough (previously only bulls could be used).
This change in the plough made it possible to clean much more territory in Germany for cultivation, and this probably the reason german population could increase that much later (and Germany became more and more important).
Here is the change in population in percentage, with year 200 = 100% and cut at 1200 because otherwise Germany’s growth would dwarf everything.
GB is the one with the worst fall, reaching the lowest level around 600 with population equal to 42.9%, but recovering to 100% by year 1000.
Italy is the second wors, with population at 44.4% at year 800 (the fall happens slightly later and also the recover, with 94.4% of the population by the year 1200).
Spain and germany have the least fall (to 70%), and France is more or less in between.
So, in my opinion, the traditional view of the Dark Ages makes most sense for Italy (whence the idea comes from) and partially for France, but much less sense for Germany, ans Spain and GB have different stories but were much more peripheric at the time than they are now.
Laban 08.19.26 at 6:49 pm
“The eventual emergence of iron as a cheap (though initially inferior) replacement ended the era of the heroic warrior.”
At this point a quote from Churchill’s (or his researchers/writers) 1930s History Of The English Speaking Peoples is apposite:
“At this point (400BC) the march of invention brought a new factor upon the scene. Iron was dug and forged. Men armed with iron entered Britain from the Continent and killed the men of bronze. At this point we can plainly recognise across the vanished millenniums a fellow-being. A biped capable of slaying another with iron is evidently to modern eyes a man and a brother. It cannot be doubted that for smashing skulls, whether long-headed or round, iron is best.”
(Currently reading Eric Cline’s “1177BC – The Year Civilisation Collapsed”, but no conclusions yet…)
engels 08.24.26 at 10:25 pm
There may be an academic debate now but people who lived in England c.800 were pretty sure that something bad had happened.
https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-ruin/
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