Alexander: Was Alexander the Great Gay?

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Alexander the Great, Ancient Greece, Colin Farrell, Hephaestion, Homosexuality, Jared Leto, Oliver Stone

One of the more controversial elements of Alexander (2004, dir. Oliver Stone) when it came out was the film’s suggestion that Alexander was homosexual. A group of Greek lawyers actually threatened to sue Stone over the issue, and the theatrical cut of the film largely avoided the issue (so far as I can recall, at any rate). But in the Ultimate Cut that Stone released in 2012, Alexander (Colin Farrell) is shown being attracted to men.

In the film Alexander has a favorite male slave, Bagoas (Francisco Bosch), who is presented as sharing his bed. At one point, Alexander gets into bed, and Bagoas climbs in with him and they kiss. On Alexander’s wedding night, when Alexander beds her, Bagoas briefly enters the room, sees that there is someone else in the bed, and discretely leaves. In another scene, Bagoas dances publicly for Alexander in a rather sexual fashion, and Alexander kisses him. So the film pretty clearly shows Alexander as having a male concubine.

Alexander kissing Bagoas

More significantly, his relationship with Hephaestion (Jared Leto) is shown as being more than platonic, although the two men are not directly shown having sex. In one scene, when they are being tutored by Aristotle (Christopher Plummer) as boys, Aristotle starts to talk about Achilles and Patroclus. Hephaestion gives Alexander a pointed looked and asks if Achilles’ love for Patroclus was corrupting. Aristotle replies that when two men lie together in lust, it does nothing for their excellence, but when two men lie together in love, it is a pure thing. On Alexander’s wedding night, Hephaestion gives Alexander a ring and the two men embrace. Roxane walks in and gets upset, asking if her husband loves Hephaestion. Alexander replies that there are many ways to love someone, and then has rather violent sex with her. When Hephaestion dies, Alexander goes crazy and either intentionally tries to get himself poisoned or goes on a bender and falls fatally ill. As he is dying, he holds up Hephaestion’s ring. So while the film isn’t explicit, it seems pretty obvious to me that Stone wants viewers to connect the dots.

Hephaestion longing for Alexander

So, was Alexander the Great gay?

Homosexuality in Ancient Greece

First, we have to acknowledge that the ancient Greeks had no concept of ‘sexual orientation’ or the like. They had no idea that most people are only attracted to the opposite sex but that some are attracted to the same sex or to both. Instead, the ancient Greeks seem to have looked at the choice of sex partners as a matter of taste, mood, and intention. They understood that many men occasionally had sex with other men or with teenage boys, but this did not mean these men did not also have sex with women. A man could easily have a wife or concubine and a boyfriend. Such attractions were to some extent treated as an issue of taste, the way a modern man might say he prefers blondes over brunettes, or say that he’s a ‘legs man’ or a ‘boobs man’. Some authors such as Plato argued that the most meaningful forms of love could only occur between men, and that real love could not exist between a man and his wife, in part because she was likely to be uneducated and therefore could not act as an emotional companion.

When the Greeks spoke about same-sex attractions, they most commonly did so through the lens of the erastes-eromenos relationship. The erastes was an older, married man (so, at least in concept, a man in his later 20s or older) who gave affection to his eromenos; he was the ‘lover’. The eromenos, or ‘beloved’, was a younger male, somewhere between early teens to early 20s, who was the recipient of affection. The erastes was both a sexual lover and a mentor to the eromenos, someone who helped usher him into adult male society through socialization. Whereas modern Americans view one of the father’s duties as teaching his sons ‘how to be men’, the ancient Greeks felt that this duty belonged at least in part to the erastes.

An erastes kissing his eromenos

But this was a complex relationship, because in the Greek world, sex was an expression of power relationships at least as much as it was an expression of romantic feelings. A man was expected to have sex with those who were beneath him socially. His wife was beneath him because she was a woman. His slaves were beneath him because they were his property. Male and female prostitutes were beneath him because they were lower class. And his eromenos was beneath him because the eromenos was not a full adult. But the eromenos would eventually reach adulthood and become a full citizen. This made homosexual sex an awkward issue for the Greeks, because it was acceptable for a teen or young men to be sexually receptive, but a fully adult man was expected to only be sexually active. Ok, let’s be blunt, an adult man had to be the penetrative partner. To be penetrated was perceived to be unmanly. It was socially awkward for an adult man to have been sexually penetrated when he was younger, because it raised questions about his masculinity as a full adult.

So the Greeks generally avoided talking directly about exactly what happened when an erastes got busy with his eromenos; looking too closely at that made them anxious. Consequently, many earlier scholars insisted either that this was a non-sexual relationship or that it involved non-penetrative forms of sex such as frottage (which is scholar-speak for dry humping).

In theory, Greek men only had sex with younger, unmarried men. But in practice, things were probably more complicated than that. We also know that the Thebans and the Spartans expected their soldiers to form romantic and sexual relationships, because they would fight harder to impress their partners and to keep them alive. The elite Theban troops, the Sacred Band, were comprised of such partners. And modern homosexual relationships often involve an older and a younger adult partner; ‘daddies’ and their ‘boys’ are both full adults, but the older man takes a leadership role in the relationship. This suggests to me (and I think to other gay scholars who have considered this) that the eromenos may not always have been a literal ‘boy’, but merely a younger man. In other words, two adult Greek men may well have had a sexual relationship, despite the fact that such a relationship would violate the cultural norm.

Far from being a shadowy thing, same-sex love was celebrated as a cultural ideal that even the great heroes and the gods engaged in. Zeus kidnapped the mortal ‘boy’ Ganymede to be his immortal eromenos, and Apollo pursued Hyacinthus for the same reason. In fact, every major Greek god other than Ares is described as having a male lover. The greatest warrior in Greek literature, Achilles, famously fights to avenge his dead companion Patroclus in The Iliad. Homer never explicitly describes the men as lovers, but by the Classical era in Greek culture (roughly, 510-323 BC), the two men were understood be erastes and eromenos, although there was a debate about which role was played by which man.

In this image of Achilles tending the wounded Patroclus, the artist has depicted Achilles as the eromenos (the beardless one)

Alexander

So what about Alexander? We know that he married three women, the Bactrian noblewoman Roxane, supposedly out of love, and the Persian princesses Stateria and Parysatis, supposedly for political reasons. Roxane gave him a son and miscarried a second child, so clearly they were having sex. He also had a son by a concubine Barsine. So it is clear that if he was attracted to men, it was not so strongly that he didn’t also have sex with at least two women. Thus in modern terms, he was not gay, but may have been bisexual.

His relationship with Bagoas is not well-detailed. Plutarch tells us that Bagoas won a dancing competition before Alexander, and the troops urged Alexander to kiss him, and another author describes Alexander as kissing Bagoas very passionately, to the applause of the troops. But whether he became Alexander’s concubine is unknown; that’s a modern idea largely created by Mary Renault in her novel The Persian Boy. (See Correction below)

Alexander’s relationship with Hephaestion is more complicated to figure out. It is clear that the two of them were extremely close throughout their lives. Several ancient authors claim that Alexander described Hephaestion as his alter ego, implying for ancient audiences that the two men enjoyed the deepest friendship possible. But were they more than friends?

Only one ancient author, the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, explicitly says that the two men were lovers. A letter, supposed written by Diogenes but possibly a forgery, says that Alexander was “ruled by Hephaestion’s thighs.”

Alexander and Hephaestion

However, Arrian tells us that when Alexander first led his army from Greece into Asia Minor, he stopped at Troy, where he laid a wreath at Achilles’ tomb and Hephaestion did the same at Patroclus’ tomb. The symbolism of that gesture is powerful and a strong suggestion that they saw themselves as having the same kind of relationship. If that’s true, then they were lovers.

If that’s the case, why don’t any ancient authors explicitly say the men were lovers? One possible answer is that there was the same uncertainty about them as about Achilles and Patroclus. Which one of them was the erastes? Alexander was undoubtedly the higher status man, which means he ought to have been the lover, but Diogenes’ accusation carries the suggestion that Alexander was not the one in charge of the relationship. The idea that the greatest conqueror in the ancient world might have been the one getting penetrated would have been as shocking as it would be for a modern action hero in a film to be getting penetrated. But while Hephaestion was socially the inferior partner, he was still a full adult and a very important man, so he could not have been the receptive partner either. So perhaps ancient authors discretely passed over this question by simply talking about an intimate friendship and assuming the reader would draw the fairly obvious conclusion.

There’s no slam-dunk proof that Alexander carpe’d the diem with Hephaestion. Given the evidence, I think it makes sense to assume that he did, and that in modern terms he was bisexual. But it’s possible that he was, in modern terms, straight and merely enjoyed a very close friendship with Hephaestion. The gay community wants to reclaim as much of its history as possible, and having one of the greatest conquerors in world history in our camp carries considerable symbolism, as those Greek lawyers understood. But wanting Alexander to be gay is not proof that he actually was, and we’ll probably just have to accept that, as with so many other details of his personality, we can’t completely resolve the issue.

Correction: It’s been pointed out to me that there is some ancient authority for the claim that Bagoas was Alexander’s concubine. The 1st century AD Roman historian Curtius Rufus reports that Bagoas had a sexual relationship with Alexander and that Bagoas wielded a certain amount of power at court as a result of it. Curtius Rufus’ sources aren’t known for certain, but he may have been using Cleitarchus’ and Ptolemy’s accounts in his history. Regardless of how factually accurate his claims are (and I see no obvious reason to reject them), it’s clear that Mary Renault was not the creator of this idea, although she’s probably the popularizer of it.

Want to Know More?

Amazon doesn’t carry the Ultimate Cut, but does carry Alexander, Revisited: The Final Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition). Stone based his film on Robin Lane Fox’s Alexander the Great. Fox is a well-regarded ancient historian, but at almost 600 pages, reading it is a serious commitment. If you want something a bit shorter (and more recent), I liked Ian Worthington’s Alexander the Great: Man and God. If you want to dig a bit deeper into Alexander, you might start with Alexander the Great: A Reader. And if you want to read one of the original sources, start with Arrian’s account, available as The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics). 

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Alexander: When Someone Asks You if Alexander is a God, You Say Yes

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Alexander the Great, Ancient Greece, Ancient Persia, Angelina Jolie, Colin Farrell, Oliver Stone, Olympias, Philip of Macedon

One of the most vexing questions about Alexander the Great is whether he thought he was a god or not, and Alexander (2004, dir. Oliver Stone) certainly digs into that question. In the film, Alexander’s mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie) insists that Zeus appeared to her and had sex with her and fathered Alexander (Colin Farrell). At times she seems to be saying this because of how much she hates her husband Philip (Val Kilmer), but at other times she seems genuinely convinced of it. Alexander becomes increasingly hostile to her and never accepts her story, but later in the film, he’s accused of accepting sacrifices to Zeus and compares himself to the god Heracles. So what really happened?

As I mentioned before, one of the big problems with understanding Alexander is that virtually all of our information about him comes from posthumous sources that themselves only survive as references and quotations in works written centuries later. This means that there is an enormous amount of room for later ideas about Alexander to have crept into the accounts of him, and getting back to the essential Alexander is quite challenging. After his death, Alexander was sometimes worshipped as a god, so it’s quite possible that later historians were reading that back onto his reign. Adding to the problem here is the question has several major pieces.

 

Olympias

In the film, the primary assertions of Alexander’s godhood come from Olympias, so let’s tackle her claims first. According to the historian Plutarch, writing about four centuries after Alexander, the night before Olympias and Philip consummated their wedding, Olympias had a dream that her womb was struck by lightning and started a great fire, and Philip dreamed that he had pressed a seal upon Olympias’ womb, leaving an image of a lion. Later, after Alexander’s visit to the oracle of Siwa (which I’ll get to later), she confirmed that Alexander was the son of the god Zeus-Ammon.

But there are two reasons to be skeptical of these stories. First, as I said, they could easily have been invented long after Alexander’s death, with the retroactive knowledge that he had accomplished things no other man had ever done. 400 years is a lot of time for people to embellish Alexander’s story. And ancient historians LOVED stories about portents that occurred at the birth of boys who would become great kings. Birth portents are practically a required element of the biography of important political figures. So right there we have good reason to be skeptical of these stories.

Jolie, Kilmer, and Farrell as the unhappy family

Second, even if the stories aren’t made up after Alexander’s death, it’s pretty easy to see why they might have been made up to please Alexander after he became powerful. So far as we know, Olympias didn’t start claiming she had gotten busy with a god until Alexander raised the issue himself at Siwa. Her story was only a confirmation of his.

 

Egypt

The second piece of the problem involves Egypt. When Alexander was conquering the Persian Empire, after his first two major victories, he swung down into Egypt, which had been ruled by the Persians for a couple centuries, and conquered it. During his visit to Egypt, he took a side trip to the western oasis of Siwa, which was home to an oracle. According to the historian Arrian, who was writing about 350 years after Alexander, “Alexander admired the site and consulted the god, and having received, as he put it, the answer which his heart desired he returned to Egypt.”

Notice that Arrian doesn’t tell us what the question was or what the answer actually said, only that it was the answer Alexander wanted to hear. Most historians believe that Alexander asked the oracle some question about whether he was a god. In order to understand this, it’s important to realize that for close to 3,000 years, the Egyptian political tradition maintained that the Pharaoh of Egypt was a living god, and by the end of independent Egypt, the official ideology was that when the current pharaoh fathered children on his wives and concubines, on some night, the pharaoh was either replaced by or inhabited by the god Ammon, who was thus the father of the next pharaoh. The ambiguity about exactly when this happened meant that any successful claimant to the Egyptian throne could be declared the son of Ammon, whom the Greeks identified with their god Zeus as Zeus-Ammon. So regardless of whether the specific question was “Am I the son of a god?” or “Am I the rightful pharaoh of Egypt?”, the answer was basically ‘yes’ to both questions, because each question implied the other.

The ruins of Siwa

The question is, why did Alexander go to Siwa in the first place? Was he seeking to find out his true parentage? Probably not. It’s much more likely that his trip to Siwa was a piece of political theater designed to legitimize his military conquest of Egypt by getting a ruling that, like previous pharaohs, he was the son of Ammon. As a military conqueror, he probably worried that unless he did this, the Egyptians would resist him after he had gone back to Persia. And he probably understood that he needed to rule Egypt according to Egyptian customs.

And consider that it was only after Alexander went to Siwa that Olympias began to claim she had done the nasty with Zeus. She was confirming what the oracle said, not asserting her own independent claim. That reinforces the sense that this was political theater, not a personal belief.

Zeus-Ammon

Alexander opens in in 331 at the battle of Gaugamela, after Alexander had returned from Egypt. The oracle of Siwa and what it said is never mentioned in the film.

 

Persia

After the death of Shah Darius III in 330, Alexander became the shah of Persia, and he began to introduce a Persian custom called proskynesis that ultimately proved quite perturbing to his Macedonian troops. Persian culture had a complex social hierarchy that was reflected in a greeting ritual known in Greek as proskynesis. The 6^th century Greek historian Herodotus describes it this way.

“When the Persians meet one another in the roads, you can see whether those who meet are of equal rank. For instead of greeting by words, they kiss each other on the mouth; but if one of them is inferior to the other, they kiss one another on the cheeks, and if one is of much less noble rank than the other, he falls down before him and worships him.”

The ritual has three forms, depending on how far apart the two men are in social status. The third form, reflecting a sharp difference in social rank, involves the lower-status man prostrating himself on the ground in front of the higher-status man. But notice that Herodotus describes this as “worshipping him.” In Greek culture, prostration was a gesture reserved for a statue of a god. This is not what the Persians understood by the ritual; for them it was purely a statement of social status. But Greeks found the ritual loaded with religious meaning. Imagine how a Christian American might understand a social custom in which some people kneel, bow their heads, and fold their hands together.

The Persian shah was the highest figure in Persian society, far above any other man. Consequently, the proper form of proskynesis when meeting him, at least on ceremonial occasions, was full prostration. When Alexander ordered this ritual to be continued, he appears to have been embracing a Persian political tradition, much the way he seems to have done in Egypt.

King Jehu of Israel performing proskynesis before an Assyrian king

But his soldiers didn’t view it that way, at least not according to Arrian. They, like Herodotus, assumed that Alexander was demanding to be worshipped as a god. Arrian refers to proskynesis as “obesience”, and offers a story about it. Normally, when Arrian tells us something, he tells us what his source for the story is, but here he only says “there is also the following story.” This seems to be his way of telling us that he’s not really sure this story happened, but that he knows it’s a famous story, so he feels compelled to tell it. As Arrian tells the story,

“It had been agreed between Alexander, the sophists and the most distinguished of the Persians and the Medes at his court that the subject should be raised during a drinking party. Anaxarchus launched the topic, saying that Alexander had much better claims to be regarded as a god than Dionysus and Heracles […]. The Macedonians would have better reason to honor their king with divine honors; there was no doubt that once Alexander departed from men they would honor him as a god. How much more justifiable it would therefore be to honor him in his lifetime rather than wait for his death, when the honor would be of no benefit to the recipient.”

As Arrian tells the story, this ‘debate’ was staged by Alexander at the instigation of the Persians, which would seem to confirm that the issue here is that the Persians felt a need to continue this political gesture. (At least, if the story is actually true.) As the story continues, once Anaxarchus said this, those who had arranged the incident began to offer proskynesis, but the Macedonians were upset about this and one of them, Callisthenes, stood up and offered a long argument against the points Anaxarchus had made. This irritated Alexander but pleased the Macedonians, so Alexander said that the Macedonians didn’t have to perform proskynesis. Everyone was quiet for a moment, but then the Persians came forward and began to perform proskynesis.

So in this story, the Persians appear, from the Macedonian perspective, to be corrupting Alexander, offering him an honor only the gods ought to be granted. The Macedonians dislike this, either because they find the idea of worshipping a living man offensive or because they feel Alexander is being misled by non-Greeks.

As I noted, Arrian seems to find the story dubious, but there is nothing inherently implausible about the central idea that the Persians wanted a ritual that the Macedonians found offensive. This sort of cultural clash happens a lot when two cultures interact, and the Greeks already considered the Persians culturally inferior. The real question, assuming the story is based in fact, is what Alexander intended. Was he looking at proskynesis simply as a political ritual, or was he, as a Greek, seeing it as having religious implications? Was the oracle of Siwa’s statement that he was a living god beginning to go to Alexander’s head? Was he beginning to suffer from megalomania?

In Alexander, the debate over proskynesis is conflated with another incident that happened in 328 BC. In that incident, at a drinking party, Alexander’s courtiers were flattering him, calling him the son of Zeus-Ammon and belittling Philip. This offended one of Alexander’s generals, Cleitus, who started praising Philip. Furious over this, the drunken Alexander jumped up, grabbed a spear and stabbed Cleitus to death. In the film, Callesthenes is collapsed into Cleitus. The quarrel begins with Cleitus (Gary Stretch) accusing Alexander of accepting sacrifices to Zeus, and Alexander compares himself to Heracles. Things spiral out of control and Cleitus winds up with a spear in his belly. Given the enormous number of incidents that Oliver Stone was trying to include in the film, collapsing these two incidents into one is perhaps forgivable.

Here’s the whole scene, if you want to watch it. It’s a good scene.

 

Opis

A fourth piece of the puzzle is the revolt at Opis. According to Arrian, at Opis, an unidentified site somewhere near the Tigris river, Alexander declared that he was sending his Macedonian troops back home. He intended to please his war-weary men with this gesture, but his troops became offended, thinking that he was replacing them with Persian troops because he despised the Macedonians and had embraced Persian culture. As Arrian puts it, “They could not keep quiet any longer, but all shouted to Alexander to discharge them from service and take his father on the expedition (by this insult they meant Ammon).”

Furious at this taunt, Alexander launched into a long diatribe about how his father Philip had found the Macedonians crude hill people and had turned them into a great fighting force, and he accused them of being ungrateful for having made them so wealthy and powerful. Then he rounded up the ring-leaders and had them executed.

This incident suggests that the Macedonians disliked Alexander’s claim that he was the son of a god. It also shows that they didn’t take it seriously, because they mocked him for it, daring him to try to continue conquering using Ammon’s support instead of theirs.

Alexander’s response can be read two ways. First, perhaps he was offended simply because his men were being disrespectful to him. His speech about his father seems to confirm that he didn’t really believe his claims to divinity and knew that his men were just poking fun at the tools he was using to legitimize his rule. But on the other hand, his furious reaction might suggest that he was becoming mentally imbalanced by the combination of his military success and the constant flattery he was receiving and felt that the taunts were a denial of his divinity.

Stone’s film conflates the incident at Opis, which happened after Alexander returned from India, with the mutiny at Beas, which happened in India and which forced Alexander to return home. In that scene, the troops don’t mention Alexander’s claims to divinity, but he executes the ring-leaders, basically because he’s trying to force them to continue into India. Stone presents the mutiny as the lead-up to the battle of the Hydaspes River, so he’s really jumbling the facts here.

 

So Did Alexander Think He was a God?

I don’t think we can definitively answer the question one way or the other. Given the problematic nature of the sources, we can’t actually prove that Alexander ever made a claim to divinity at all, only that four centuries later, reliable historians like Plutarch and Arrian believed that claims to divinity were part of his campaign. But even if we accept their stories as being basically true, we’re left to two possible scenarios.

In one scenario, Alexander recognizes that he needs to claim divinity in order to rule Egypt. He does so, and has his mother confirm the claim. In Persia, he applies the same logic and maintains the Persian tradition of proskynesis for purely political reasons. But his men grow increasingly uncomfortable with these gestures because they violate Greek sensibilities, and they don’t understand that these are purely political gestures that Alexander doesn’t actually believe himself. His anger at Opis stems from the fact that his men are being disrespectful, not because he actually thinks he’s a living god.

This is a totally plausible scenario. But Alexander was deeply steeped in Greek culture, and knew how to manipulate its symbols to build support from his troops. Why was he able to view proskynesis from the Persian perspective when his troops weren’t? Why didn’t he find receiving proskynesis as uncomfortable as his men found performing it, and why didn’t he understand that the gesture was offensive to them?

Alexander as kosmokrator, “ruler of the universe”

The alternative scenario is that what started out as political gestures gradually turned into personal belief. Alexander’s truly remarkable military and political accomplishments led him to conclude that he really was a living god. The oracle said so, his mother said so, the Persians were basically worshipping him, and he was doing what no man in history had ever done. Constant Persian flattery and what was probably growing alcoholism were making him mentally unstable, and he reached a point where he could not bear to hear resistance to his claims of divinity, leading to the deaths of Cleitus and the ring-leaders at Opis.

Many of the ancient sources certainly seem to point this way. Arrian repeatedly suggests that the Persians were drawing Alexander away from Greek culture and that this had a corrosive effect on Alexander’s personality. But Greek culture loved stories about hubris, in which a remarkable person becomes arrogant and loses respect for the gods and the limits of humanity; their arrogance eventually forces the gods to punish them. The original sources for Alexander are all Greek, so it’s very plausible that his first biographers saw Alexander through this traditional lens of hubris and shaped their narratives to reflect that idea.

The second scenario is more satisfying, because it offers us a tidy moral of pride being a great man’s downfall. We like that idea almost as much as the Greeks did. We want to apply it to later historical conquerors like Napoleon and Hitler, both of whom we tend to associate with insanity, just as we like the idea of Alexander as a megalomanic.

And the seductive nature of the second scenario is why I find the first scenario more likely. The second scenario is simply too pat, too easy, for my taste. The first scenario, with its complex story about the intersection of three different cultures and their religious and political traditions, feels much more real to me, much more like the way history actually plays out.

Alexander tries to straddle these two scenarios. It presents Olympias as making her first claims for Alexander being a demi-god when he is a young boy, and constantly repeating the claim at nearly every turn. Alexander seems to hate these claims, and yet as a successful conqueror he begins to accept them, comparing himself to Heracles. Farrell’s Alexander is a man haunted by his tortured relationship with his semi-deranged parents, who are a violent, abusive drunkard and a snake-obsessed man-eating nightmare version of Mama Rose. He flees his parents but finds himself unable to escape their legacy, repeating their mistakes and falling prey to their delusions. However, he never goes to Siwa, never demands proskyness, and never actually says he’s a god. Stone is much more interested in Alexander as a human being than Alexander as a politician, and so he avoids the whole question of just what Alexander was doing with his claims to divinity.

While it’s not a very satisfying answer to the question of whether Alexander thought he was a god, it’s not a bad portrait of who the great conqueror might have been as a human being.

 

Want to Know More?

Amazon doesn’t carry the Ultimate Cut, but does carry Alexander, Revisited: The Final Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition). Stone based his film on Robin Lane Fox’s Alexander the Great. Fox is a well-regarded ancient historian, but at almost 600 pages, reading it is a serious commitment. If you want something a bit shorter (and more recent), I liked Ian Worthington’s Alexander the Great: Man and God. If you want to dig a bit deeper into Alexander, you might start with Alexander the Great: A Reader. And if you want to read one of the original sources, start with Arrian’s account, available as The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics). 

Alexander: The Battles

Tags

Alexander the Great, Ancient Greece, Ancient Persia, Colin Farrell, Gaugamela, Hydaspes River, Military Stuff, Oliver Stone, Raz Degan

Alexander the Great is, of course, one of the greatest generals in history. So Alexander (2004, dir. Oliver Stone) is, naturally enough, bookended with two of Alexander’s most important battles. So let’s look at how Stone handles them.

Alexander had four major battles in his Asian Campaign: the Granicus River (334 BC), Issus (333 BC), Gaugamela (331 BC), and the Hydraspes River (326 BC). Stone starts the movie in 331 BC, thus completely eliminating the first two battles. A viewer could be forgiven for thinking Alexander took down the Persians in a single battle. But I think this omission was a reasonable choice. The film is already quite long, and trying to depict those two battles would probably have added another hour or two to the film’s running time.

 

Gaugamela

At Gaugamela, Alexander (Colin Farrell) confronts the forces of Darius III (Raz Degan), and I think Stone does a fair job of trying to capture what the battle looked like. During the battle, Darius’s main force clashed with Alexander’s left wing, under General Parmenion, while the Persian cavalry on the left flank tried to get around Alexander’s right flank. To prevent that, Alexander led his cavalry against Persian cavalry.

One reconstruction of the opening phase of Gaugamela

Then, when the Persian infantry had engaged the Greek infantry, Alexander led a cavalry charge against Darius’ position, forcing Darius to flee. Alexander could have pursued and perhaps captured Darius, but he received word that Parmenion’s forces had been surrounded by the Persian cavalry, and so he reluctantly broke off the attack to come to Parmenion’s rescue. As a result, he would have to pursue Darius for another year, until the Persian generals killed their own shah.

Overall, this is roughly what Stone offers us, although instead of Darius making the first moves, he has Alexander attempt a flanking maneuver and then encountering the Persian cavalry. But apart from that alteration, the battle plays out roughly according to the sources. Stone gets Alexander’s and Darius’ forces more or less right in terms of what weapon systems they were using. Someone’s posted a sort of epitome of the sequence on Youtube so you can see what the fight looks like.

And, if you jump to about the 5:30 mark, when Alexander is charging at Darius’, you’ll see that Stone has very nicely worked in an allusion to the most famous ancient image of Alexander, the Alexander Mosaic from Pompeii.

The problem with the whole scene comes not with what it depicts, but how it treats the two sides. The Greeks are shown as rigidly disciplined while the Persians are shown as being a disorderly mish-mash of troops. In reality, the Persian forces were highly-disciplined, wore uniforms, and used tools like music to communicate tactics and co-ordinate movements. Alexander inspires his men with a speech in which he compares the freedom-loving Greeks, who are fighting for their homeland and averaging the assassination of Philip of Macedon, with the Persian army, whom he describes as slaves to the shah. But if you think about it, it’s hard to see how the Greeks can be fighting for their homeland when they are the ones who invaded Persia.

Alexander’s speech is not without justification, since in some ways it represents the actual propaganda Alexander used to inspire his subjects. The Greeks certainly saw themselves as a ‘free’ people and the Persians as being enslaved. And a careful viewer will realize later in the film, when we see the flashback to Philip’s murder, that the Persians had nothing to do with the assassination and therefore that Alexander must be lying to his men. But the film doesn’t ask the viewer to think of the speech as propaganda and leaves us to assume Alexander is speaking the truth, especially since his speech fits in quite well with Hollywood’s grand tradition of battle speeches praising “freedom”.

So the viewer is left with the sense that the Macedonian troops were better-disciplined and more moral than the Persians. It’s no wonder that some Iranians were offended by the film.

 

The Hydaspes River

The film bookends Alexander’s campaign with the battle of the Hydaspes River, fought on the Jhelum river (which the Greeks called the Hydaspes) in modern Pakistan. Historically, Alexander decided to force a crossing of the river despite the fact that it was swollen by the monsoon rains. Alexander left a portion of his army facing King Porus across the river, with orders to General Craterus to make feints to lead Porus to think that Alexander would try to cross the river there. Then Alexander led the rest of his forces about 17 miles up-river and crossed unimpeded. He came down the right bank of the river, forcing Porus to move to intercept him while leaving some of his army to face Craterus.

Alexander was able to catch Porus between two wings of cavalry, forcing Porus to further split his forces. The ensuing battle was fought on a muddy plain during a rainstorm. Porus employed about 100 elephants who wreaked havoc among Alexander’s pikemen until Alexander’s javelin-throwers were able to rout the elephants, who then rampaged through Porus’ own troops (it was for just this same reason that the Carthaginians a few centuries later were to nickname their elephants “our mutual enemy.”) After a brutal battle that left a reported 20,000 men dead, Porus was eventually forced to surrender. A year later, after a mutiny by his troops, who were demanding to return home, Alexander reluctantly marched south to the coastline. During a siege, he was badly wounded.

Stone’s Hydaspes, however, comes after the mutiny of the troops. Alexander agrees to let his Macedonians go home, but then petulantly shames them into continuing on, saying that they will be remembered as the ones who abandoned their leader when he marched into India. Then he confronts Porus at Hydaspes. The scene completely omits the river and depicts the battle as a less successful version of Gaugamela, in which Alexander tries unsuccessfully to flank Porus (in the middle of a jungle on a sunny day) and then has to rescue his center flank because the elephants are massacring Craterus’ pikemen. Craterus is killed by an elephant, when in fact he outlived Alexander. Alexander then seeks a confrontation with Porus and comes close to killing him, only to be badly wounded and have his horse Bucephalus killed underneath him. A weakened Alexander decides to return home.

The changes do make a difference in how we understand Alexander. The historical Alexander, after a decade of getting brilliant performance from his troops, finally pushed his men too far, and they were able to force him to bring his campaign to an end. Stone’s Alexander, however, returns home out of his own sense of exhaustion and perhaps a sense of mortality. He remains the master of his troops all the way to the end. So Stone’s version of events is one in which events are shaped purely by Alexander’s personal choices. Had he chosen to continue, he would surely have found a way to get his reluctant soldiers to continue to follow him. This is a Great Man view of history, a common failing of historical biopics.

So while Stone gets the first battle roughly correct, he completely misrepresents the second battle. But at least his battles make sense, unlike some other movie about ancient Greece I could mention.

 

Want to Know More?

Amazon doesn’t carry the Ultimate Cut, but does carry Alexander, Revisited: The Final Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition). Stone based his film on Robin Lane Fox’s Alexander the Great. Fox is a well-regarded ancient historian, but at almost 600 pages, reading it is a serious commitment. If you want something a bit shorter (and more recent), I liked Ian Worthington’s Alexander the Great: Man and God. If you want to dig a bit deeper into Alexander, you might start with Alexander the Great: A Reader. And if you want to read one of the original sources, start with Arrian’s account, available as The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics). If you want to know more about Alexander’s campaign, you might check out the Osprey publishing book on Alexander 334-323 BC: Conquest of the Persian Empire (Campaign)

Alexander: The Trouble with Sources

Tags

Alexander the Great, Ancient Greece, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Colin Farrell, Hephaestion, Hydaspes, Jared Leto, Oliver Stone, Olympias, Philip of Macedon, Ptolemy, Rosario Dawson, Val Kilmer

Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC) is one of the most famous and successful conquerors in history, and his conquests had enormous and far-reaching effects. So it’s a little surprising that so few films have been devoted to him. Apart from two Bollywood movies about him and an Italian animated film, there have only been two films about him, 1956’s Alexander the Great, starring Richard Burton, and 2004’s Alexander (2004, dir. Oliver Stone), starring Colin Farrell.

Writing a biography of Alexander is a challenging thing, because the earliest sources about Alexander have been completely lost. Alexander had a professional historian, Callisthenes, who served him and wrote a history of Alexander (although he did not accompany him on his campaign). Callisthenes’ work is now lost, but it was used as a source by Ptolemy and Cleitarchus (the former of whom had known Alexander well, being one of his generals) when they wrote their histories of Alexander. Another of Alexander’s officers, Aristobulus, also wrote a history of the conqueror, and his admiral, Nearchus wrote about Alexander’s exploits in India. But none of these histories have survived either.

Instead, what has survived are the works of much later historians who quoted Cleitarchus, Ptolemy, and Aristobulus in their works. For example Diodorus wrote his history around the year 30 BC, drawing off of Cleitarchus’ account. Curtius Rufus, writing about 60 years later, used Cleitarchus and Ptolemy’s histories. Arrian, writing in the early 2^nd century AD, tapped Ptolemy, Aristobulus, and Nearchus but ignored Cleitarchus. Plutarch, writing about the same time as Arrian, used all but Nearchus. (Confused? Here is a page that explains it.)

So the result is that the most reliable sources can only be known through other, much later sources. These sources often disagree. The various sources mention a range of legends about Alexander, some plausible, some not. The result is a rather confusing welter of possibilities about who Alexander was, what he did and what he wanted.

A ancient Greek bust of Alexander

So perhaps it’s fitting that Oliver Stone struggled to produce a film that told the conqueror’s story. When Alexander was released in the theaters, it was as a 175-minute version, reportedly with some cuts having been made because of pressure over the films depiction of Alexander’s homosexual relationships (a group of Greek lawyers threatened to sue Warner Brothers at one point). When it was issued on DVD a year later, Stone’s Director’s Cut was 167 minutes, with footage taken out and other footage added and scenes in a different order. In 2007, Stone released Alexander Revisited: the Final Director’s Cut, which was 214 minutes long. Then, in 2012, Stone released his Ultimate Cut, a 206-minute version that Stone swore would be his last. Thus far he’s kept his word.

I saw the original theatrical release in 2004, and my memories of it are hazy, except that Val Kilmer and Angelina Jolie, playing Alexander’s parents Philip and Olympias, were involved in a scenery-chewing contest in which the winner was whomever was being paid to build replacement sets. My reaction at the time was pretty much a big ‘meh’.

But when I sat down to watch the Ultimate Cut, which is what Netflix has, I came away relatively impressed. The film has serious problems. It’s long and at time it drags. Alexander inherits his parents’ tendency toward histrionics, especially as he gets older. The film compresses various details, attributes historical actions to different people, and omits the first three years of Alexander’s campaign against the Persians. And it’s reluctant to depict Alexander’s homosexual relationships (although it does, if you listen closely, acknowledge that Alexander and Hephaestion [Jared Leto] were lovers) while dwelling at length on Alexander’s consummation of his marriage to Roxane (Rosario Dawson).

Farrell as Alexander

But it still does a very good job of telling a coherent story about who Alexander was, what motivated him, and what he did. Farrell’s Alexander is a man haunted by his awkward relationship with his drunken father and his increasingly hostile relationship with his shrewish, demanding mother, who is convinced that Alexander’s real father was the god Zeus. Convinced that Philip’s decision to take a second wife means that she and Alexander will be pushed aside, Olympias probably orchestrates Philip’s very public assassination to ensure that her son will become king. So Alexander spends his whole adult life trying to outdo his father and to get as far away from his mother as geographically possible. His father is a drunkard who violently assaults Olympias at least once, a dynamic he recreates with Roxane, who is jealous of Hephaeston, who is in turn jealous of Alexander’s relationship with the slave Bagoas (Francisco Bosch). He also struggles with the things that the philosopher Aristotle taught him, and wrestles with the question of whether he can match the deeds of Heracles and the other sons of Zeus. And his relationships with his generals and battle-companions veer from warm camaraderie to political quarrelling and jealous accusations of betrayal. This Alexander is a complicated, tormented man, pulled in many different directions at once, and in that sense he is perhaps one of the most complex characters ever put on the screen. It’s a fitting attempt to capture the personality of a man who both an historical giant and a mystery.

Stone also demonstrates that he has a keen mind for how to depict warfare on the screen. He does a good job making his two major battle scenes, Gaugamela and Hydaspes, intelligible to the viewer. At Gaugamela, he makes excellent use of a literal bird’s-eye view to help the viewer understand the overall battle while also explaining to the viewer that different portions of the army are doing different things. He smartly labels the scenes “Macedonian Center” or “Macedonian Right” so that viewers can understand how Alexander’s unit relates to the other parts of the army in the middle of the fighting. And at Hydaspes, Stone makes breath-taking use of cinematography in a scene in which Alexander, mounted on his faithful horse Bucephalus, confronts the Indian king Porus, riding in a howdah on the back of an elephant. Watch the scene for yourself and tell me that the shot isn’t breath-taking.

 

Ptolemy’s Memoirs

One of the things about the film that I like is that it purports to be the memoirs of Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins), now an old man, having ruled Egypt for decades. The film opens and closes with Hopkins dictating his account to a pair of scribes. The film has a complex structure; within Ptolemy’s narrative, we get the sequential account of Alexander’s adult conquests interspersed with sequential flashbacks to Alexander’s childhood, as we see the various events that shape who Alexander was to become. Ptolemy’s narration explains key background facts and provides commentary on various events. And because the whole film is Ptolemy’s reminiscences, we are always aware that the events we are seeing are history.

Ptolemy dictating to his scribe

Because of this, we know the film is not the events as they happened but Ptolemy’s version of those events (although he’s a bit of an omniscient narrator, since he knows what Alexander says to his lovers in private moments). This allows Stone to play around with the complexity of his historical sources. He shows us key moments, such as Philip’s murder, an attempt to poison Alexander, the death of Hephaistion, and Alexander’s death, without giving us a statement of exactly why those events happened. And then Ptolemy later comments about what he thinks happened.

For example, Philip’s murder takes place when he is appearing at a public spectacle. One of his bodyguards, Pausanius, walks up to him, kisses him, and then stabs him to death. Olympias watches the whole scene impassively, having already hinted to Alexander that he ought to remove his father before his father removes him. In an earlier scene, however, Philip is shown anally raping Pausanius during a drunken party. And early in the film, Alexander has repeatedly declared that the Persians were behind the murder.

Kilmer as the one-eyed Philip of Macedon

The viewer is left to decide what happened. Did Pausanius commit the murder out of a desire for revenge? Did Olympias orchestrate it? Pausanius clearly had some help, since when he flees he is trying to meet up with another man who has a spare horse, but he falls and Cleitus spears him before he can be interrogated. Was Cleitus part of the plot? The whole scene follows one in which Cleitus and Alexander have a falling out during a drinking party and Alexander spears Cleitus. Could Alexander have been part of the plot? At the end of the film, Ptolemy comments that Olympias was probably the one behind the murder.

What’s going here is that Stone is playing around with the contradictory sources about the incident. Diodorus, expanding on a comment made by Aristotle, claims that Pausanius committed the murder out of revenge for being raped. But other sources claim that Olympias lavished honors on the dead Pausanius, including putting a crown on his corpse, suggesting that she was behind the crime. Alexander clearly stood to gain quite a lot from the murder. And Alexander blamed the murder on Darius, using it as an excuse to invade Persia. So the film gives us at least three different perspectives on the killing before finally giving us Ptolemy’s idea of what happened.

Similarly, when Hephaeston dies, Alexander suspects poison and confronts Roxane, who denies the charge. He then throws a party in which he drinks a large amount of wine and immediately falls ill, with symptoms not unlike Hephaeston’s. Stone leaves it ambiguous just what happened. Is Alexander trying to get himself poisoned after his lover has died? Or is he distraught about the man’s death and seeking to get drunk to forget what’s happened? Is he just exhibiting his father’s alcoholism? At the end of the film, Ptolemy comments that many suspected Roxane in Hephaestion’s death and suspected one of the generals, Cassander, of poisoning Alexander. Ptolemy comments that Cassander fabricated Alexander’s diaries in an attempt to depict him as a bloated drunk, in order to make his death seem more natural.

Leto as Hephaestion

And then he drops the bombshell. “The truth is, we did kill him. By silence we consented, because… because we couldn’t go on….What did we have to look forward to in the end, but to be discarded like Cleitas?” A few moments later he turns to the scribe. “Throw all that away. It’s just an old man’s rubbish. You shall write, ‘he died of a fever in a weakened condition.’”

Once again, Stone is playing with the complex question of what actually happened. Different ancient sources offered varying claims about exactly what Alexander died of, either poison or a fever (perhaps malaria). Consequently modern historians are divided about the role that alcohol, poison, illness, or some other problem might have played in Alexander’s death.

And Ptolemy’s confession is ambiguous. Is he admitting that there was an actual plot among the generals to murder Alexander, or when he says “by silence we consented,” is he just expressing a sense of guilt that he might have saved Alexander had he acted differently? Is this just an old man’s momentary foolishness, or something true? Regardless, Ptolemy immediately rewrites his text, obscuring the truth for posterity, and reminding the audience that this is history as it is written, not history as it happened.

Stone also uses Ptolemy to explain what happened to other characters after Alexander’s death. Cassander assassinated Olympias a few years later, and a few years after that poisoned Roxane and her young son. Roxane had already poisoned one of her rivals, Stateira. Bagoas simply disappeared, perhaps wisely, given what was happening around him. Ptolemy got Alexander’s body and followed him as pharaoh of Egypt. The scene is a bit wordy, but a nice variation on the usual “what happened to the characters” epilogue.

And then, in the epilogue, Stone gives us one last twist of the sources, telling us that Ptolemy’s memoirs were lost with the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria. So what we can know about Alexander is a rewrite of a rewrite of a writing of the past, and not the past itself.

 

Want to Know More?

Amazon doesn’t carry the Ultimate Cut, but does carry Alexander, Revisited: The Final Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition). Stone based his film on Robin Lane Fox’s Alexander the Great. Fox is a well-regarded ancient historian, but at almost 600 pages, reading it is a serious commitment. If you want something a bit shorter (and more recent), I liked Ian Worthington’s Alexander the Great: Man and God. If you want to dig a bit deeper into Alexander, you might start with Alexander the Great: A Reader. And if you want to read one of the original sources, start with Arrian’s account, available as The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics).