The History Behind the Sea Peoples in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’

Greek History TAs will be fielding questions about the Sea Peoples for years, thanks to Christopher Nolan's latest film.

A number of characters throughout Christopher Nolan’s telling of “The Odyssey” are disquieted by rumors of “people from the sea.” These shadowy forces haven’t appeared — yet. But when they do, the victors of the Trojan War are worried they’ll bring destruction, chaos, and, potentially, a civilizational dark age with them. 

What’s so unnerving is that nobody knows who the Sea Peoples are — not Penelope (Anne Hathaway), hemmed in as she minds the “empty” throne of Ithaca; not Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), brash, bored, and bitter in post-war Sparta; certainly not Telemachus (Tom Holland), who would just as easily settle for news of his long-absent dad Odysseus (Matt Damon).

It may or may not be a comfort to them to know that historians don’t have a definite answer, either, and they have been asking “who are the Sea Peoples?” for a very long time. 

Nolan’s inclusion of the term “Sea Peoples” is the writer/director drawing from history instead of Homer, and infusing his film with the sense of a world on the brink of collapse. The Trojan War is a legendary event, and, whatever basis in history there was for it, it had already vanished deep in the mists of the past by the time the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” were first composed in the eighth or seventh century BCE. To misappropriate a phrase closer to us, for the Archaic Greeks who first fell in love with the story of “The Odyssey,” it happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

But for Christopher Nolan, the true gods and monsters are always found in human genius and human choices. He ties his Trojan War to the Bronze Age Collapse, a historical period of intense conflict — and possibly also dramatic climate shifts — about 3,000 years ago. These stresses put pressure on all of the existing, interconnected kingdoms in the Mediterranean. Some, like New Kingdom Egypt, were able to survive the turbulence. But the Hittite Empire in what’s now Türkiye and the Mycenaean cultures in what’s now Greece did not. 

There are a few (frustratingly vague) mentions in Egyptian records of groups that scholars have dubbed “Sea Peoples,” and how pharaohs like Ramesses III met them in battle and drove them off, or resettled them on the borders of Egypt. Since those translations of Egyptian inscriptions first appeared, historians have theorized about how much of the Bronze Age Collapse might be due to external invasion by the Sea Peoples, how much mass armed migration might have displaced the existing balance of power, or whether these Sea Peoples existed at all. 

More recently, scholars tend to be less comfortable assigning full or partial blame to the Sea Peoples for the Bronze Age Collapse. But there has been a lot of work done to trace the potential origins of the groups of seafarers the Egyptians said they defeated, origins that include the Aegean islands, the Greek mainland, Sicily, Sardinia, and Cyprus. This is the world that wasn’t yet, but would become, Ancient Greece™.

The horrified revelation that Odysseus brings to his wife toward the end of Nolan’s film — that we are the people from the sea — has its roots in those scholarly theories about groups of raiders, pirates, and/or migrants leaving the Mycenaean world for greener pastures during a time of intense political and economic stress. But in the film, of course, the idea is being put towards a very specific thematic end. Nolan is interested in the legendary world of “The Odyssey” insofar as it reflects our own back to us — a world that is breaking apart and seems poised on the edge of darkness not because Gods willed it, but because we broke it. 

Even more than his inclusion of the idea of “The Sea People” as a consequence of the Trojan War, Nolan uses history to create immediacy through a concept the film calls “Zeus’ Law.” Though it’s said to come from the God of Thunder, as expressed in the film, it’s a pretty Golden Rule-type idea — Telemachus says that it means that you should treat strangers the way you ought to be treated, because the stranger in your midst might be a god. While that isn’t quite a historical truth, Nolan is referencing the real, ancient Greek concept of xenia. 

This term gets translated as both “hospitality” and “guest-friendship,” and it is equally a reflection of the dangers of travel in a world which has no Holiday Inns as it is a mechanism for networking and diplomacy. Through observing the customs of xenia, an elite man who enters another elite man’s home and is entertained appropriately becomes a guest-friend, and that friendship connects their families and cements a bond of reciprocity for more than one generation. It was a way for elites to project power and influence through ritualized hospitality and gift-giving, instead of war and dominance.

Throughout Homer’s epic, “The Odyssey” is deeply concerned with the correct and incorrect forms of xenia — the abduction of Helen, Odysseus’ captivity on Calypso’s island, the cannibalism of the Cyclops, and the lavish wastefulness of Penelope’s suitors are all perversions of hospitality. At the end of the poem, Odysseus transforms from an abused guest to a murderous host, neither of which is ideal. 

Nolan takes this concern and broadens it to apply to more than elite male householders in Ancient Greece. On the wide, mythic stage that Nolan sets, through Odysseus’ oh-so-clever, treacherous scheme of the Trojan Horse as much as anything else, the entire world has lost the ability to deal generously with strangers and foreigners. When we don’t feel we have basic obligations of decency and care to those who are different from us, violence and destruction inevitably follow. 

To appropriate another fictional example closer to our contemporary world, what makes “The Odyssey” meaningful to Nolan and the reason he pulls from history as much as myth is that, however vivid and imaginative and fantastical the journey, all of this has happened before. All of it will happen again. It is happening right now.

“The Odyssey” is now playing in theaters.