Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I didn't have a book to bring to the gym at work today, so I scanned the shelves of my (shared) office and plucked from them Lionel Robbins' A History of Economic Thought . Now mind you, I have no axe to grind with Robbins, and the remarks of his I will highlight below have little bearing on any practical current debate. I only note them to show how very wrong even major thinkers often are when they wander outside their area of expertise. I started with Robbins' second lecture, on Plato and Aristotle. The first sign of trouble was when Robbins says that in The Laws , Plato has a "fascist conception" of the best society, rather than a communist one as in The Republic . So Robbins is trying to line thinkers of 2400 years ago with the political parties of his day, a completely hopeless task that falsifies the past. Next up: "Before the Renaissance Plato was not at all well know, whereas " the Philosopher" (Aristotle) was appealed to by most of th...