Yesterday, I went to see Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated film The Odyssey. It was superb.
.
That said, one line spoken by Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, caught my attention:
“I hear that bands of marauders known as the ‘Sea Peoples’ have been attacking city-states everywhere. They would finish the civilization.”
.
In ancient times, the “Sea Peoples” attacked cities along the Mediterranean coast, ushering in several decades of civilizational decline. But did this really happen around the same time as the Trojan War, in which Odysseus fought?
.
I asked ChatGPT to look into it. It turns out that, if both events occurred when tradition says they did, they were indeed almost contemporaneous—sometime around the beginning of the twelfth century BC.
.
(Odysseus’s voyage took him back and forth across the Aegean Sea.)
.
That opens the door to all sorts of intriguing hypotheses. As ChatGPT and I batted ideas back and forth, we began to wonder whether the allied forces sent against Troy by the Greek city-states might themselves have been part of the “Sea Peoples.”
After all, the Sea Peoples were not a single unified group, and their true identity remains uncertain to this day. So the idea is entirely plausible. From the viewpoint of Troy at the time, the Greeks—the Achaeans—who came from the west were uncivilized barbarians.
Then a thought occurred to me. What follows is a reconstruction of my conversation with ChatGPT.
.
Author:
So they really were contemporaries. The idea that the Achaeans were among the “Sea Peoples” is fascinating—and quite plausible. It makes me want to turn the whole thing into an absurdist comedy in which the “Sea Peoples” are either the Russian army led by Putin or the American military led by Trump and his cohort.
.
ChatGPT:
Ha! There is definitely a film in that. And if you superimpose modern politics on the ancient historical structure while leaving that structure intact, it will work far better than a mere parody.
Imagine the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC. One palace civilization after another is collapsing. Then a mysterious people known only as the “Sea Peoples” appears in front of Troy. Panic spreads through the coastal city:
.
“Who on earth are these people?”
The trouble is, the Sea Peoples themselves are not quite sure.
One contingent declares, “We are the Russian army,” led by a man who looks exactly like Putin. Beside him, a man who looks exactly like Trump proclaims:
“No, we are the greatest Sea Peoples in history. Nobody has ever seen Sea Peoples like this.”
The Achaeans grumble and say, “Wait a minute. Aren’t we the Sea Peoples?”
And through it all, only an Egyptian scribe remains perfectly serious, faithfully recording every last detail on the stone walls.
.
——Good heavens, what a glorious mess. Apparently, AI can write absurdist comedy too.
Leave a Reply