We do not know what killed him in Babylon at the age of 32, although poison was almost certainly not to blame. What were his aims before he died? We have a description of his supposed Last Plans which include the merging of Asia and Europe by intermarriage, transfers of people and acts of assimilation. His Macedonian veterans, hardened Asia-sceptics, would have hated such a notion. Was this plan invented by his officers so that the troops would be sure to reject all the proposals which were put to them after Alexander’s death? It was important to air them and have them cancelled before a rival claimant to his legacy could produce separate plans and claim them as authentic.
Nobody denies Alexander’s military boldness, although armchair critics have questioned his readiness to take extreme risks. But his story has more to it than a sharp eye for the possibilities of the battlefield and a gift for “dynamic manoeuvres” to unsettle enemy forces. He has the spell of youth and idealised beauty and a vast ambition to conquer all the lands as far as the eastern edge of the world. His geography was appallingly bad, no better than the teaching of his great tutor, Aristotle. He had no idea of China or the Far East. He believed that the world would end in northwest India. When it did not, his men refused to go farther east, leaving him to turn south down the River Indus and think that he had found the southern edge of the world at its mouth. He was exploring the extent of the northern edge by sending an officer up to investigate the Caspian Sea. If he had not died, I believe that he would have marched west to find the world’s western edge, believing it to lie beyond our Strait of Gibraltar. He had no idea of America, let alone of Hollywood.
Why did he have such a stunning ambition? He was young, he saw himself explicitly as the rival of the supreme hero, Homer’s Achilles. He even went up to the old site of Troy to honour what was supposed to be the mythical Achilles’ grave. I suspect that he was determined to outshine his remarkable father, Philip and his conquests, as relations between the two had been uneasy. For a while, it seemed that he might pull off his plan of conquering everyone, but the story is better than that. The world was too big and denied him his young man’s ambition. It humbled him, but his career remains much more than a tale of failed conquest. It raises questions of empire and social inclusion, the “justification” of war and the presence, or absence, of a will to change or increase the potential of the Asia which he had overrun. His great Alexandria in Egypt was only one of many more such Alexandrias which he founded and wished to be famous. He never founded a city in honour of a woman, but I hugely admire him for founding one in honour of his beloved horse, Bucephalas. These new towns were not just military garrisons, because he settled garrisons, too. Scholars who wish to deflate him dispute the number of these foundations and even exalt the dynasts who followed him, as if they were the real heroes. In my view, there were at least 16 Alexandrias.
When Alexander settled some of the Iranian nomads into towns, his friend and officer, Nearchus, explains that he did so in order that they might be at peace with one another, “fearing for the safety of what would now be their possessions”. Our post-colonial era finds it all hugely unfashionable, but Greek contemporaries of Alexander had certainly written of taming and civilising the barbarian world. Previous kings of Macedon were well aware of the civilising power of the Greek culture which they patronised. One reason why his aims and achievements are disputed is that the original sources are so indirect. Alexander did appoint an official historian and publicist, Callisthenes, a kinsman of Aristotle. However, he had him put to death on suspicion of encouraging a conspiracy among his young pupils. We know his official history only from a few later quotations and other authors’ apparent use of it. If only it could re-emerge on papyrus from Egypt or the volcanic ash of Herculaneum. More than 20 other histories were written within 50 years of Alexander’s death, but we have none of the originals. We have to reconstruct them from later historians who added purple prose or mistakes of their own.
The most important of these lost originals was written by Alexander’s life-long friend, Ptolemy, who went on to found a new royal house in Egypt. I believe that the ageing Ptolemy wrote in order to set the record straight and was decidedly economical with the truth. He was responding to all sorts of inventions and legends that already existed. For historians, much depends on the relative value they give to one or other source of such information, recycled in later antiquity. Oliver Stone’s new film is clever in putting the elderly Ptolemy upfront as the person who tries to recall what Alexander meant. Any serious book on Alexander has to decide how to cope with conflicting details and evidence which are as problematic as the differences between the four Gospels. As a result, scholarship on Alexander goes on worldwide, a process to which film-making is irrelevant.
The scholarship, however, can never be objective. Alexander divides opinions sharply, not only in Western universities, but throughout the world he invaded. Behind the conflicting evidence I continue to see the self-styled rival of the Homeric heroes whose own Macedonian society had elements evocative of the legendary world of Homer’s poems. Certainly, he deliberately included Iranian noblemen and troops in the previously exclusive units of his court and army. He was not just exploiting them as supplementary manpower, but plainly appreciated them, although many of his more limited Macedonians did not.
Other historians try to brush this aside. They see a paranoid and ungenerous tyrant who supposedly killed off rivals on invented charges and may even have plotted to kill his father. They belittle his Alexandrias as “a new wave of barbarism from the west”, while nationalists in the Near East accuse him of slaughtering their ancestors. Historians with a post-imperial perspective prefer to empathise with the people he killed because they would not surrender. The campaigns that some consider so bold and great are seen by others as a blood-stained waste. Stone has been attacked for implying that a conqueror was a “colossus”, although the words are only given to his Ptolemy. When the director made Heaven and Earth, he saw the Vietnam War through the eyes of a contemporary Vietnamese, but the film was a box-office flop. Now, critics are predicting that his Alexander will be a failure because it has taken the opposite tack.
As the world changes around his historians, Alexander’s image in history will go on changing, too. Attempts to eliminate any grander plan or vision from his exploits still fail to convince me. They require some artful evasions of evidence implying the opposite. On the big screen, these perennial arguments are just as compelling and even Stone’s Alexander is not a onesided hero. In fact, the film focuses on yet another source of Alexander’s lasting fascination and, no, it is not the question of whether or not he was “gay”. (Every historian knows that he had sexual relations with both males and females and that he was not unusual in doing so in his Ancient Greek world.) What is unusual is that he inspired a fictional romance of his life long before Hollywood came along to enhance it. It was translated from Iceland to China, a global bestseller like a medieval Lord of the Rings. It is still active. When my daughter Martha was in Kazakhstan ten years ago, she stayed in a tribesman’s tent. When he asked her about her father, she told him that I wrote about Alexander the Great. Her host looked wistful. We used to have the most beautiful walnut trees here in my country, he said, but then Alexander invaded it, and took them all away to Macedonia, which is why there are none to be seen here now.
When Alexander died, so the story goes, he left orders in his will that his mother, Olympias, should send out invitations to a dinner for everyone who had not known sadness in the world. She prepared the dinner and waited, but nobody came. Then, as Alexander intended, she realised that she was not alone in her sadness. Whatever hostile critics in America have said, the new, vast epic of Alexander will certainly not be playing to empty houses.
EPIC MISTAKE
Oliver Stone’s Alexander has so far failed to conquer the critics
The New York Times “Dry and academic . . . (Colin Farrell was) upstaged by his epically bad dye job.”
Variety “Startling visions of antiquity . . . will surely stay in the mind long after the dramatic vicissitudes have been forgotten.”
Rolling Stone “How’s Alexander? Not Great.”
The Daily Telegraph “This is one of those instances where a top team of Hollywood professionals have conspired to ensure that their leading man looks as ludicrous as possible.”
The Sun “Colin Farrell has been given the worst hair in cinema.”
The News Tribune “Not since Cleopatra has there been a historical epic that goes so spectacularly wrong in so many ways . . . Why anyone would want to follow this guy anywhere is the movie’s great mystery.”
San Francisco Chronicle “How could a film go so wrong?”
Los Angeles Times “It’s an indifferent epic . . . a plodding endeavour.”
Alexander is released in Britain on January 6
Alexander the Great by Robin Lane Fox is published by Penguin (£5.99, offer £5.09 plus p&p; call 0870 1608080)
