Without romanticizing life on the barbarian fringe, Beckwith, Lattimore, and others make it clear that leaving state space for the periphery was experienced less as a consignment to outer darkness than as an easing of conditions, if not an emancipation. As the state was weakened and under threat, the temptation was to press harder on the core to make good the losses which then risked further defections in a vicious cycle. A scenario of this kind, it appears, was partly to blame for the collapse of the Cretan and Mycenaean centralized palatial state (circa 1,100 BCE).
