[username332211]

Or, if you were less charitable about the nature of Bronze Age social organization, you could say it's a society of former slaves hopelessly romanticizing their former masters.

On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)

[ahazred8ta]

Doonesbury: "Aha! The Hittites!" "You know their work?" "Complete degenerates. But tough to beat after they invented iron." https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1978/12/26

Ea-Nasir's buddies were experimenting with adding hematite flux to remove slag from copper. They wanted to improve their copper, and wound up giving us IRON. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-year-copper-smelting-site-key....

[mr_toad]

Slavery was quite common in classical Greece too, especially in Sparta.

[KineticLensman]

Athens too - the vast majority of the population were slaves or 'metics' - non-Athenian foreigners. Some slaves worked as partners with their citizen master and it wasn't unusual for such a slave to be adopted into a family and thus become a citizen. Such slaves had greater rights than women, who could never become citizens.

[username332211]

That was chattel slavery which doesn't generate the same feelings of devotion compared to divine monarchy. We've all seen the great sadness of the North Korean people at the passing of their Dear Leaders.

This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent even from most modern systems that are close to chattel slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human trafficking operations.