* * *

The Phoenician octopus feeds on Israelites and on other peoples drawn to the Mediterranean by an initial decision to resist Leviathanization.

We’ve seen that earlier Leviathans provoked Steppe peoples to flee or defend themselves, and that either alternative set off waves of motion that could even be felt in distant China.

Mittani, Kassites and Hittites were some of the many who braced themselves to confront the Leviathan head-on and then found themselves trapped in a Leviathanic net of their own making. Once armored and entrenched, the iron Hittites then set in motion new waves with their conscript-hunts and tribute-raids.

Myceneans, Ionians and Dorians may have descended to Anatolia and the Greek mainland and archipelago in response to Hittite provocations. Linguistically these people are cousins of Hittites, Kassites and Mittani, of Aryans who showed up in India, and even of the Persians who will eventually succeed to the whole of Anatolia and the Levant.

Iranian- (or Indo-European) speaking and Turkic-speaking people seem to move together in the steppes. Later they will turn up together on the borders of Rome’s empire; at least they’re not strangers to each other. Some of these people are seed planters who move only when pushed; others are pastoral nomads. Some of them are horse-breeders who can move quickly from Mesopotamia to China, and a few forge their weapons out of iron.

Mycenean Greeks were already in Anatolia and on the Greek mainland during the heyday of the Hittite Leviathan. Mycenean vases dating from the middle Hittite period will be found in Cyprus, Egypt and the Levant, and as far as Sicily and Ireland; Mycenean olive oil must have been transported to all these places in Phoenician ships, since there will be no evidence of a large commercial Mycenean fleet. They made occasional use of a script, but had neither a king nor a permanent army. Their former community had shattered, but they had not yet encased themselves in a Leviathan of their own, although their Theseus tried hard. They either joined Hittites on conscript hunts or else went tribute hunting on their own; newcomers of almost identical speech didn’t treat them as kin but as enemies. The Myceneans fortified their towns and held off the newcomers, probably with Hittite aid. Almost immediately after the demise of the Hittites, one after another of the Mycenean strongholds began to fall to the Ionian and Dorian Greeks.

The indignities suffered by the newcomers before their arrival will not be accessible to scrutiny, since the later Greeks will choose to forget their pre-Leviathanic past. We can nevertheless try to form some idea of the nature of these indignities by looking elsewhere.

On an Assyrian tablet contemporary with the destruction of Mycenae, the scribe of the first Tiglathpileser boasts that in a single campaign to the region north of Lake Van, the tyrant and his army captured thousands of Mushki, by which name the Assyrians designated Phrygians, Hurrians, Greeks and other speakers of Indo-Iranian languages.

The Greeks sweep their Mycenean predecessors away during the period when the Phoenician commercial empire is at its height. Like their Guti predecessors, the Greeks form tribal leagues of warriors led by a Basileus, a one-time priest who is now a war chief. Also like the Guti, they remain federated for such a long time that they lose all contact with their original communities. Of their own former deities they bring mainly Zeus, the spear-throwing thunderer who guides the war chief. They take the Minotaur, the Labyrinth, Helen, Artemis and Demeter from Anatolia and Crete. The Phoenician ships bring them Cadmus, Europa and a Leviathanic project.

The earliest federations, among them the famous Agamemnon’s, seem as determined as the much later Mongols to sweep away every trace of what the Greeks will later call Civilization. They raze fortresses and don’t rebuild them, flatten palaces and don’t copy them, destroy writings and don’t learn their script. They use the tablets of Hittite scribes as stones in walls of new fortresses. Their spears are their gods and they live for battle.

But when the big ships come in and unload purple cloth and ivory, the heroes commit themselves to regaling the strangers with gifts next time. Their neighbors, especially the women among them, squeeze the oil out of olives and the juice out of grapes. The Greeks offer to protect the neighbors instead of harassing them, and they offer some of the gifts they’ve received from the Phoenicians. They post guards at shrines and dance-grounds where women become demented with drink and gang up against the protectors. And the Greeks stock up on vases.

Agamemnon’s grandsons turn up on the Aegean’s shores as merchants of wine and olive oil. One after another enclave becomes a tentacle of the Phoenician octopus.

When the head of the octopus is swallowed by the Assyrian worm, each Greek tentacle is on its own.

This story is usually told as the shadowy emergence of the Greeks out of darkness and into the light of Civilization. But at least one Greek who is not yet armored experiences the sequence as something quite different from an emergence into Light.

The poet Hesiod remembers better times. He is a contemporary of the Assyrian invasion of Phenicia, and thus a contemporary of the Greeks preparing to launch a commercial empire of their own.

Hesiod writes of five ages or generations of mortal human beings. The earliest, pastoral nomads who lived somewhere in the steppes and mountains, were

a golden race... And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief... They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.

These first ones are not altogether gone; they

roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist, and keep watch on judgments and cruel deeds.

While still in the steppes, the communities of pastoral nomads were disrupted by agents of a Leviathan, and there appeared

a second generation which was of silver and less noble by far. It was like the golden race neither in body nor in spirit... Zeus the son of Cronos was angry and put them away, because they could not give honor to the blessed gods who lived on Olympus.

When the earth covered the disoriented second generation, there appeared those who federated against the disrupters;

a third generation of mortal men, a brazen race, sprung from ash trees; and was in no way equal to the silver age, but was terrible and strong. They loved the lamentable works of Ares and deeds of violence; they ate no bread, but were hard of heart like adamant, fearful men. Great was their strength and unconquerable the arms which grew from their shoulders on their strong limbs. Their armor was of bronze, and their houses of bronze, and of bronze were their implements... These were destroyed by their own hands and passed to the dank house of chill Hades, and left no name...

Then came the war chiefs praised by Homer, the

hero-men who are called demi-gods, the race before our own... Grim war and dread battle destroyed a part of them, some in the land of Cadmus at seven-gated Thebe when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus, and some, when it had brought them in ships over the great sea gulf to Troy...

Last comes the fifth generation, Hesiod’s own, the victims and accomplices of wine and olive merchants, the Greeks at last initiated into the arts of Civilization by their Phoenician guides. Hesiod writes,

Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labor by day, and from perishing by night.... Might shall be their right: and one man will sack another’s city. There will be no favor for the man who keeps his oath or for the just or for the good; but rather men will praise the evil doer and his violent dealing.... Envy, foul mouthed, delighting in evil, with scowling face, will go along with wretched men one and all. And then Aidos and Nemesis, with their sweet forms wrapped in white robes, will go from the wide-pathed earth and forsake mankind to join the company of deathless gods...

Hesiod’s remembrance of things past gives him a power Moses had lacked: the power to remove his Leviathanic mask while still enmeshed in a Leviathanic web. We will call such a power “critical theory,” an insipid name for it. This power will later be shaped into a dagger with two edges, but not by the Greeks to whom Hesiod gives it.

Hesiod’s fellow Greeks turn their backs on the gift he so freely gives them because, at the very moment when he is reminding them of their Golden Age, the Assyrian Leviathan is swallowing the Greeks’ Phoenician mentors and guides, and Hesiod’s companions are preparing to hurl themselves into an octopus of their own.