Actually Reading the Book Club

I’ve been geeking out on The Odyssey, getting ready for our first discussion next week. Lately I’ve fixated on two events in the history of the Mediterranean. The Bronze Age Collapse of 1200BC the period the fall of Troy takes place in The Odyssey’s prequel The Iliad, which seems to typify events that were happening across the entire Mediterranean at the time.

The Mediterranean seems to have experienced a complete economic collapse in a 50 year time period around 1200BC. Historians don’t seem to know concretely why or how it happened though there are theories There seems to have been a migration of “sea peoples” who marauded the region, decimating Egypt and destroying its hold on the Lavant, and the Hittite Empire in modern Turkey collapsed. The  possibility that earthquake wrecked havoc on the region as well?

However it happened it resulted in the trade systems halting and the palace system crashing.

This is the world of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the pathway out of destruction. Yet these stories weren’t put to paper until 800-750 BC. 400 years after the events were proposed to happen. The worlds of 1200 and 800 BC in The Mediterranean were very different. There was a shift from a centralized palace system to a city-state system, trade systems were expanding, alphabets and writing were more prolific, and the Greeks began fighting wars differently with the invention of the phalanx and Hoplite warrior.

I’m only 9 chapters in, but already I feel like Homer was addressing this dramatic 400 year shift. Odysseus represents an era of the before, and Telemachus the new era in the Mediterranean. It’s a story on lineage but also a cultural story. It matters deeply that Telemachus is the son of Odysseus, and that these suitors and new men around Telemachus’ mother Penelope aren’t behaving properly. So it’s more than just a “who we are” narrative, it’s also a “how we behave” narrative.

This post is already too long…but that’s where my mind is and I’m excited to see where the story takes me.

The link below is to a YouTube/Podcast series on the era that I found incredibly helpful.