The Uses Of Terror

Piracy, civilizational collapse, and Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

I finally managed to see The Odyssey two weeks ago, after a fruitless attempt to hold out for seats at the Metreon IMAX here in San Francisco. (One of the strange dynamics of the movie business right now is the existence of a massive imbalance between supply and demand of IMAX theaters—but only when Christopher Nolan has a new film out.) While I had gathered from some of the reviews and commentary that there were allusions to the deadly “People Of The Sea”—more commonly called “The Sea Peoples”—I was surprised to see that Nolan had actually made the Bronze-age marauders a central presence, albeit mostly offscreen. Their looming, anarchic threat is alluded to multiple times over the course of the film, and plays a critical role in Odysseus’s controversial final soliloquies where he expresses remorse for the carnage he unleashed in the sacking of Troy.

According to Matt Yglesias, who published his own Substack post on this topic shortly after I started writing this, the consensus seems to be that Nolan got interested in the history of the Sea Peoples from reading Eric Cline’s book, 1177 B.C. But the allusions caught my attention because I had devoted an opening chapter of my book Enemy Of All Mankind—which mostly follows the life of the 17th-century pirate, Henry Every—to the mysterious history of the Sea Peoples, and the legacy they left behind. (Some of what follows is adapted from that book.) I gave the chapter a name that I suppose was a not-so-subtle nod to Michel Foucault, but that would have been right at home in Nolan’s Odyssey: “The Uses Of Terror.”

The Sea Peoples are fascinating for many reasons, but they have almost no direct connection to the text of The Odyssey. Even before the film was released, social media was filled with derisive commentary about all of Nolan’s alleged infidelities, from the allegedly woke casting to the portrait of Odysseus as a PTSD sufferer. But you could make the argument that Nolan strayed the most from the ur-text in his recurring evocations of the Sea Peoples. (As others have noted, even using the phrase “People of the Sea” is an anachronism—the name originates with the 19th-century Egyptologist Gaston Maspero.) The closest thing to a direct reference to the Sea Peoples in the canonical version of The Odyssey is a description of their lawless lifestyle rather than their modern archaeological moniker. In his translation of The Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald captures them as “reckless wanderers of the sea, who live to prey on other men.” Beyond that, the people we now identify as the Sea Peoples left no explicit signature of their own in the text.

The most vivid representation of the Sea Peoples in the archeological record can be seen at Medinet Habu, the Mortuary Temple of Ramses III, in the form of images etched in bas-relief on the temple walls, depicting scenes of terrible carnage: warriors carrying javelins and daggers, fortified by shields and Aegean armor, fending off a shower of arrows; an officer wearing Egyptian headgear a split second away from decapitating a fallen enemy; a bloodied mound of corpses signaling the total annihilation of the invading forces.

While historians and archeologists have long debated the origins and impact of the Sea Peoples on Mediterranean culture, they have nowhere near the prominence in the general public’s imagination that, say, the Trojan War or the pyramids of Egypt do. This is largely because they spent most of their prime living an entirely nautical existence. They did not leave temples or monuments behind to astound tourists three thousand years after their demise. They did not pioneer new forms of agriculture, or compose philosophical tracts. They left no written records at all. In Nolan’s hands—taking his cues from Cline—they have relevance to us today as a cautionary tale about civilizational collapse. But the Sea Peoples should loom larger in the modern memory of the ancient world for another reason, the one that drew me to write about them in Enemy Of All Mankind: they were the first pirates.

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The geographic origins of the Sea Peoples remain a matter of debate among historians. The prevailing theory is that the Sea Peoples were a collection of refugees from Mycenaean Greece who first took shape as a coherent cultural group at the end of the Bronze Age. Some of them were warriors and mercenaries, others ordinary laborers who had previously been employed at borderline slave wages building the immense infrastructure and fortifications that marked the heyday of the Mycenaean age: the network of roads in the Peloponnese or the deepwater harbor at Pylos. Their origins are necessarily murky because the Sea Peoples ultimately became, like so many pirate communities since, a multiethnic group, defined not by their allegiance to a single city-state or emperor, but rather by their own elective allegiance to the floating community they had formed. Their homeland was the Mediterranean, and the ships they sailed upon it. They built customs and codes that helped define their tribal identity: they sported distinctive horned helmets—clearly visible in the Ramses III engravings—and their ships were adorned with figureheads of birds. But what made them so unusual was their rootlessness, both in the sense of leaving behind their geographic homelands and of being perpetually in motion, never stopping long enough to put down roots.

That rootlessness implied a political stance, one that would be adopted by the most radical of pirates in the centuries to come. The Sea Peoples did not respect the authority of the existing land-based regimes that surrounded the Mediterranean. They were not bound by the laws of terrestrial states. This is one of the key ways in which the Sea Peoples mark the point of origin for piracy as a form of self-identity. Before the Sea Peoples, there were no doubt acts of piracy committed on the open sea; as soon as human beings began transporting valuable goods via ship, you can be sure there were criminals scheming to intercept those vessels and run off with the loot. But a true pirate is not just a subclass of criminal like a bank robber or a petty thief. Most people we consider to be criminals are people who break the law deliberately, but who still, in other aspects of their lives, acknowledge the rule of law. They get driver’s licenses, and pay taxes, and vote. They consider themselves citizens, just not entirely law-abiding ones. To be a true pirate implies a broader disavowal. The pirate renounces the long-distance authorities of nations and empires. This is why the pirate flags that every grade-schooler can recognize today—centuries after they were last flown in earnest—carried so much symbolic heft. The pirate sails beneath the colors of his or her own rogue state.

The legacy of the Sea Peoples also included another key element that would come to define the pirate culture of Every’s time: the tactical deployment of spectacular violence and terror. Under siege by the Sea Peoples, King Ammurapi of Ugarit—part of modern-day Syria—sent a desperate missive to another ruler in Cyprus: “My cities were burned, and [the Sea Peoples] did evil things in my country. The seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.” The inscription at the temple of Ramses III sounds a comparable note in its description of the coastal raids of the Sea Peoples: “All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. A camp was set up in one place in Amor. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being.” They brought a near apocalyptic destructiveness to their interactions with all land-based communities, a violence that seemed almost arbitrary in its intensity. The Sea Peoples did not invade lands to claim them as their own, or extract treasure or slaves to bring back to their homeland. They seemingly torched the great capitals of the Bronze Age just to watch them burn.

The pirates’ willingness to challenge the legal and geographic boundaries of state power—and their propensity for spectacular violence—made them frequent enemies of centralized authority. Nimble, unburdened by legal or moral restraints or by state bureaucracies, the pirates had many advantages over their larger antagonists. But they were not invulnerable to a concerted effort by a centralized government to defeat them. In 1179 BCE, the Sea Peoples launched an attack on Ramses’s forces in the Battle of the Delta. Anticipating their attack, the pharaoh had constructed ships designed specifically to combat the Sea Peoples’ naval advantage. He set up a network of scouts to watch for invading ships, and anchored his new fleet just out of sight in the many channels feeding the delta. The drawings at Medinet Habu show the Sea Peoples without oars in their galleys, suggesting that they were ambushed. The scenes bring to mind the storming of the beaches at Normandy: a scattered mass of boats washing ashore and men scrambling off into the waves, only to be picked off by distant Egyptian archers. Many bled to death in the shallow water.

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The only other potential reference to the Sea Peoples in the original Odyssey comes near the end of the book, where Odysseus, disguised as a beggar at Ithaca, pretends to be a former Person Of The Sea, and recounts a story that is chillingly reminiscent of the 1179 Nile attack:

On the fifth day we reached the river Aegyptus; there I stationed my ships in the river, bidding my men stay by them and keep guard over them while I sent out scouts to reconnoitre from every point of vantage. But the men disobeyed my orders, took to their own devices, and ravaged the land of the Egyptians, killing the men, and taking their wives and children captive. The alarm was soon carried to the city, and when they heard the war cry, the people came out at daybreak till the plain was filled with horsemen and foot soldiers and with the gleam of armour. Then Jove spread panic among my men, and they would no longer face the enemy, for they found themselves surrounded. The Egyptians killed many of us, and took the rest alive to do forced labour for them.

I may be treading close to a spoiler alert here, but in Nolan’s version he turns this fictitious allusion to the Sea Peoples into something much more real. In the film, the story of civilization-collapsing violence Odysseus tells in his return to Ithaca is not some imaginary conflict in the Nile, but rather an assault of his own devising: the sacking of Troy itself. You can sense how important that theme is to Nolan—a theme that is again mostly absent from the original text of The Odyssey—in the fact that he introduces the other glaring anachronism in the film to drive the point home, when Damon announces in his final monologues, “Our age of bronze is coming to an end.”

(As an aside, I think it’s pretty hilarious that both times Nolan wants to sneak in a modern-day expression to support his civilizational collapse narrative, he decides to just reverse the syntax—Peoples of the Sea, Age of Bronze—as though that somehow makes the phrase more period-appropriate.)

Like other critics, I wasn’t particularly convinced by Nolan’s reframing of The Odyssey as a document of civilizational collapse, in part because it feels grafted onto the very end of what is otherwise a richly entertaining action movie. But all the invocations of the Sea Peoples put an idea in my mind that hadn’t occurred to me before: that those “reckless wanderers of the sea” are even more interesting as an exemplar of the stateless communities that I have been writing about in my Planet Of The Barbarians series. (Which also reminded me that I have to finish the final installment of that series.) I hadn’t quite made the connection between those recent explorations—much of them inspired by the work of James C. Scott—and the work that I had done six or seven years ago on the history of piracy. It’s strangely satisfying as an author when you realize the thematic threads that you’ve been following are even more densely interconnected than you initially thought.

When I was working on Enemy of All Mankind, however, the Sea Peoples captured my imagination for a different reason—one that had less to do with the pre-history of maritime raiding and more to do with how their story ended. Enemy is a story with an unsolved mystery at its close, which is always a bit of a challenge for an nonfiction author trying to be true to the facts of the history while still bringing the narrative to a satisfying conclusion. And there happened to be an echo of that mystery in the history of those first pirates themselves. Describing the wreckage of the Sea Peoples’ fleet in 1179 BCE, the scribes of Ramses III wrote a line on the temple walls of Medinet Habu that was more prophetic than its authors might have realized: “Their hearts are taken away; their soul is flown away.” After their defeat at the Nile Delta, the Sea Peoples exited almost immediately from the world historical stage. Scholars are as divided about their ultimate fate as they are about their enigmatic roots. The ones who were not executed after the Battle of the Delta appear to have been scattered along the eastern frontier of the Egyptian realm, some of them on the Palestinian coast. But as a coherent—if itinerant—group, they had ceased to exist by the time Ramses died in an apparent assassination in 1155 BCE.

In this respect, too, the Sea Peoples established a tradition that many a pirate would emulate in the centuries to come. Some pirates, like Francis Drake, take their spoils and return to “legitimate” society. Some end up hanging on a gallows. But some of them just disappear.