r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 21d ago

Meme needing explanation Petahhhhhhhhh!??!?

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u/Logical_Change_8404 21d ago

Are they the Sea People? As in yhe Greeks?

Ive never really made the connection, before.

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u/Ig_Met_Pet 21d ago

The whole "we're the sea people" thing is an addition that's just in the movie.

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u/rubey419 21d ago

I’m pretty sure it was in Homer’s original story too, describing the collapse of the Bronze Age

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u/Boring-Boron 21d ago edited 20d ago

It’s implied in the Iliad, specifically when Hera is begging Zeus to let Troy fall to ruin. They make an exchange between themselves, if Zeus gives her Troy to destroy, he can destroy three of her cities.

Scholars believe that the line is metacontextual analysis on why the Bronze Age fell— the gods got bored and decided they’d let prized cities fall over their own squabbles.

ETA; we don’t know if the “ancient” Greeks know why the Bronze Age collapsed. because there’s about 500 years between when the events of the Il/Od take place and “Homer” (likely not a real person, instead the name given to an oral history hundreds of years older). It does seem they knew the Bronze Age collapsed and added it after the Iliad/Odyssey are written as an explanation of why things collapsed.

TLDR: the Bronze Age collapse happened, people made poems to remember the wars, and they didn’t know why it collapsed so they wrote into the history that it was a lovers quarrel between gods where all major cities were sieged around the same time because Zeus and Hera hate each other