How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Although Alexander had, apparently, set out simply to complete his father’s plan—that is, to drive the Persians away from the coastal cities of Asia Minor, which for centuries had been culturally Greek, ostensibly in retaliation for a century and a half of destructive Persian meddling in Greek affairs—it’s clear that, once in Asia, he began to dream much bigger dreams. Within three years of crossing the Hellespont, he had defeated the Persian Great King, Darius III, in a series of three pitched battles—Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela—in which he triumphed against sometimes dire odds. It was in the rout that followed Issus that Darius fled the field of battle, leaving his wife, children, and even his mother behind in the baggage train. Alexander, with characteristic largesse and fondness for the beau geste—like most extravagant personalities, he had a capacity for generosity as great as his capacity for ruthlessness—honorably maintained the captives in royal state. His brilliant victory on the plain of Gaugamela in Mesopotamia in October 331 B.C., made him the most powerful man the world had ever known, ruler of territories from the Danube in the north, to the Nile valley in the south, to the Indus in the east. He was also the world’s richest person: the opulent treasuries of the Persians at Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis yielded him the mind-boggling sum of 180,000 silver talents—the sum of three talents being enough to make someone a comfortable millionaire by today’s standards.

  After Gaugamela, Alexander, driven by a ferocious will to power or inspired by an insatiable curiosity (or both), just kept going. He turned first to the northeast, where he subdued stretches of present-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and there took as a wife the beautiful Roxana, daughter of a local chieftain, much to the consternation of his xenophobic aides. Then he moved to the south, where his designs on India—he believed it to be bordered by the “Encircling Ocean,” which he longed to see—were thwarted, in the end, not by military defeat but by the exhaustion and demoralization of his men, who by that point, understandably, wanted to head back to Macedon and enjoy their loot. Himself demoralized by this failure in support, Alexander relented and agreed to turn back.

  The westward return journey through the arid wastes of the Macran desert toward Babylon, which he planned to make the capital of his new world empire, is often called his 1812: during the two-month march, he lost tens of thousands of the souls who had set out with him. That tactical catastrophe was followed by an emotional one: after the army regained the Iranian heartland, Alexander’s bosom companion, the Macedonian nobleman Hephaistion—almost certainly the king’s longtime lover, someone whom Alexander, obsessed with Homer’s Iliad and believing himself to be descended from Achilles, imagined as his Patroclus—died of typhus. (The two young men had made sacrifices together at the tombs of the legendary heroes when they reached the ruins of Troy at the beginning of their Asian campaign.) This grievous loss precipitated a severe mental collapse in the king, who had, in any event, grown increasingly unstable and paranoid. Not without reason: there were at least two major conspiracies against his life after Gaugamela, both incited by close associates who’d grown disgruntled with his increasingly pro-Persian policies.

  Within a year, he himself was dead—perhaps of poison, as some have insisted on believing, but far more likely of the cumulative effects of swamp fever (he’d chosen, foolishly or perhaps self-destructively, to pass the summer in sultry, fetid Babylon), a lifetime of heavy drinking, and the physical toll taken by his various wounds. He was thirty-two.

  There can be no doubt that the world as we know it would have a very different shape had it not been for Alexander, who among other things vastly expanded, through his Hellenization of the East, the reach of Western culture, and thus prepared the soil, as it were, for Rome and then Christianity. But as extraordinarily significant as this story is, little of it would be very interesting to anyone but historians and classicists were it not for a rather curious additional factor: what the Greeks called pothos—“longing.” The best and most authoritative of the ancient sources for Alexander’s career are the Anabasis (“March Up-Country”) and Indica (“Indian Affairs”) by the second-century A.D. historian and politician Arrian, a Greek from Nicomedia (part of the Greek-speaking East that Alexander helped to create) who was a student of Epictetus and flourished under the philhellene emperor Hadrian; throughout his account of Alexander’s life, the word pothos recurs to describe the emotion that, as the historian and so many others before and after him believed, motivated Alexander to seek far more than mere conquest. The word is used by Arrian of Alexander’s yearning to see new frontiers, his dreamy desire to found new cities, to loosen the famous Gordian knot, to explore the Caspian Sea. It is used, significantly, to describe his striving to outdo the two divinities with whom he felt a special bond, Herakles and Dionysos, in great deeds. An excerpt from the beginning of the final book of Arrian’s Anabasis nicely sums up the special quality that the pothos motif lends to Alexander’s life, making its interest as much literary, as it were, as historical:

  For my part I cannot determine with certainty what sort of plans Alexander had in mind, and I do not care to make guesses, but I can say one thing without fear of contradiction, and that is that none was small and petty, and he would not have stopped conquering even if he’d added Europe to Asia and the Britannic Islands to Europe. On the contrary, he would have continued to seek beyond them for unknown lands, as it was ever his nature, if he had no rival, to strive to better the best.

  What Alexander’s psychology and motives were, we are in a particularly poor position to judge, the contemporary sources being absent. But there can be little doubt that the quality that Arrian describes here—the restlessness, the burning desire to see and to know new things and places for (it seems) the sake of knowing—is what captured the imagination of the world in his own time and forever afterward.

  Particularly striking was his openness to the new cultures to which his conquest had exposed him—not least, because it showed a king who had clearly outgrown the notoriously xenophobic ways of the Greeks. This new sensibility expressed itself in some of Alexander’s boldest and best-remembered gestures, all of which have the touch of the poetic, even the visionary about them: his courtly behavior toward the family of the defeated Darius (the Persian emperor’s mother became so close to the man who defeated her son that on hearing that he had died, she turned her face to the wall and starved herself to death); his creation of a vast new army of 30,000 Iranian “Successors,” meant to replace his retiring Macedonian troops (a plan that provoked mutiny among the Macedonians); the grand mass wedding he devised the year before he died, in which he and nearly a hundred of his highest officers were married, in the Eastern rite, to the cream of Persia’s aristocratic women as a symbol of the unification of the two peoples.

  Yet however much it resulted in a desire to form a new hybrid culture, the appeal of Alexander’s pothos is precisely that it seemed to be an expression of something elementally Greek. Travel for the sake of knowing, a burning desire to experience new worlds at whatever cost, and the irreversible pain that results whenever a Western “anthropologist” makes contact with new civilizations: these are, of course, themes of another famous Greek text, although not the one Alexander associated himself with. For while he may have seen the Iliad as the blueprint of his life, what gives his life such great narrative and imaginative appeal for us is, in fact, that it looked so much like the Odyssey. Indeed, he was, perhaps, Tennyson’s Odysseus as much as Homer’s. Without pothos, Alexander is just another conqueror. With it, he’s the West’s first Romantic hero, and possibly its first celebrity.

  Many of the problems with Stone’s movie arise because Alexander is torn between the facts of its subject’s life and the romance of his personality—between showing you all the research that’s been done (there are fussy re-creations of everything from Alexander’s tactics to Darius’s facial hair) and persuading you of Alexander’s allure. Between these two horses the movie falls, and never gets back on its feet.

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nbsp; A great deal has been made in the press of the scrupulousness with which the director endeavored to remain true to the known facts: “historical accuracy” was heralded as a hallmark of this latest in a string of big-budget Hollywood treatments of classical material. Stone retained a retired Marine captain as his military adviser; and engaged Robin Lane Fox, the author of a popular biography of Alexander, as a historical consultant—in return, apparently, for allowing Fox, an expert horseman, to participate in a big battle scene. (A remunerative strategy that, I fervently hope, will not recur in the cases of classicists called on to advise the directors of future toga-and-sandal epics.) There is no denying that a lot of the film is richly detailed, despite some inexplicable gaffes—why a mosaic wall map in the Greek-speaking Ptolemy’s Egyptian palace should be written in Latin is anybody’s guess—and absurd pretensions. (The credits are bilingual, with awkward transliterations of the actors’ names into Greek characters: to whom, exactly, is it necessary to know that Philip II was played by “OUAL KILMER”?) Research has obviously gone into matters both large and small, from the curls in Darius’s beard to the layout of the Battle of Gaugamela, which at thirty minutes makes up one-fifth of the entire film, and which has been dutifully re-created in all its noise and confusion, right down to the clouds of orange dust, which, we are told, obscured the field of battle. Even in the much-discussed matter of the accents the actors are made to assume, there is in fact a certain method: Stone has all the actors who portray Macedonians speak with an Irish (and sometimes a Highland) brogue, the better to suggest the cultural relationship of the back-country Macedonians to their lofty Greek counterparts. (To poor Olympias, played with scenery-devouring glee by Angelina Jolie, he has given a peculiar Slavic drawl.)

  And yet the matter of accents, however admirably motivated, also helps to illuminate a weakness that is characteristic of the film in general. For the director’s clever notion ends up being an empty gesture, since there are virtually no Greeks in his film for the Macedonians to be contrasted with. Apart, that is, from a two-minute appearance by Christopher Plummer as Aristotle, who is shown lecturing to his pubescent charges among a pile of (inexplicably) fallen marble columns, describing the differences between the beneficial and the deleterious brands of same-sex love—a scene patently included in order to prepare audiences for the fact that little Alexander and Hephaistion will grow up to be more than just wrestling partners. (Provided with this Aristotelian introduction, we are supposed to breathe easy in the assumption that they’re the kind who, as the great philosopher puts it, “lie together in knowledge and virtue.”) The absence of Greeks in the movie is more than structurally incoherent: it’s a serious historical omission, given that Alexander’s troubles with the Greeks back home were a critical problem throughout his career.

  The narrative of much of Alexander has, indeed, a haphazard feel: it’s not at all clear, throughout the three hours of the film, on what basis Stone chose to include, or omit, various events. Vast stretches of the story are glossed, with patent awkwardness, by a voice-over narration by the aged Ptolemy (who’s shown, in a prologue sequence set in his palace in Alexandria, busily writing his history forty years after Alexander’s death). But in lurching from Alexander’s youth to his victory at Gaugamela, the film misses many crucial opportunities to dramatize its subject: there is nothing about Egypt, no oracle at Siwah—an event of the highest importance and certainly worthy of visual representation—and no double sacrifice at Ilium, which would have nicely suggested the intensity of Alexander’s attachment both to the Achilles myth and to Hephaistion, certainly more so than the silly dialogue about “wild deer listening in the wind” that Stone puts in the lovers’ mouths. (As with many an ancient epic, this one veers between a faux-biblical portentousness and excruciating attempts at casualness: “Aristotle was perhaps prescient.”) Even after Gaugamela, there are inexcusable omissions. Where, you wonder, is Darius’s mother; where, crucially, is the mass interracial wedding pageant at Susa? And what about the story of the Gordian knot, a chestnut that illustrates, with brilliant concision and in an eminently filmable way, Alexander’s approach to problem solving?

  What does get packed into the film, on the other hand, is often treated so perfunctorily as to be meaningless to those who don’t already know the life; a better title for this film would have been Lots of Things That Happened to Alexander. Famous tidbits of the biography—a reference to his tendency to cock his head to one side; another to an embarrassing episode in which his father mocked his fondness for singing—are awkwardly referred to en passant to no purpose other than to show that the screenwriters have studied hard and know about these details. Much that is of far greater importance is similarly poorly handled: the conspiracies against his life, the mutiny in India, and above all his ongoing and ultimately failed efforts to impose the “prostration,” the Persian ritual obeisance to the king, on Macedonians and Persians alike are either so briefly alluded to or so hurriedly depicted as to leave you wondering what they were about. Historical characters are similarly paraded across the screen, often without being introduced, again merely to show that the filmmakers have done their homework. The beautiful Persian eunuch Bagoas, who our sources tell us was presented to Alexander as a peace offering by a surrendering satrap, and who seems to have remained faithful to his new master for the rest of his life, suddenly appears, in this version, as little more than an extra in the harem at Babylon, and the next thing you know he’s giving Alexander baths. Something, you suspect, got left on the cutting-room floor.

  There is little mystery, on the other hand, about why other episodes are prominently featured. The courtship and marriage to Roxana, for instance, get a disproportionate amount of screen time—not least, you can’t help feeling, because Stone, whatever the loud claims that here, at last, was a film that would fearlessly depict Alexander’s bisexuality, was eager to please his target audience of eighteen-to-twenty-six-year-old males. Hephaistion and Alexander occasionally give each other brief, manly hugs, whereas a lengthy, stark-naked wedding-night wrestling match between Alexander and Roxana makes it clear that they, at least, were not going to be lying together in knowledge and virtue. (The sexual aspect of Alexander’s relationship with his longtime lover is, in fact, entirely relegated to Ptolemy’s voice-over: you don’t envy Anthony Hopkins having to declare that Alexander “was only conquered by Hephaistion’s thighs,” one of the many clunkers that evoked snickers from the audience.)

  The perceived obligation to cram in so much material affects Stone’s visual style, which—apart from some striking sequences, such as a thrilling and imaginatively filmed battle between the Macedonians on their horses and the Indians on their elephants—is often jumbled and incoherent. There’s a famous story about how, when the captive Persian royals were presented to the victorious Alexander, the queen mother, mistaking the taller and handsomer Hephaistion for the King, made obeisance to him. “Don’t worry, Mother,” Alexander is reported to have said, “he, too, is Alexander.” This crucial encounter, so rich in psychologically telling detail, is filmed so confusingly in Alexander that it’s impossible to tell, among other things, that the Persian lady (here, for no reason at all, it’s Darius’s wife rather than his mother) has made a mistake to begin with, and so the entire episode disintegrates into nonsense.

  What all this betrays is a problem inherent in all biography, which is that a life, however crammed with dazzling incident, does not necessarily have the shape of a good drama. The reason it’s exhausting, and ultimately boring, to sit through Alexander—and why the movie started disappearing from theaters so soon after its release—is that while it dutifully represents certain events from Alexander’s childhood to his death, there’s no drama—no narrative arc, no shaping of those events into a good story. They’re just being ticked off a list. To my mind, this failing is best represented by the way in which the action of Stone’s movie suddenly and inexplicably grinds to a halt three-quarters of the way through in order to make way
for an extended flashback to Philip’s assassination a decade earlier. It seemed to come out of nowhere, was lavishly treated, and then disappeared, as the filmmaker scrambled to get to the next historically accurate moment. A lot of Alexander is like that.

  Even this wouldn’t necessarily have mattered if the movie had managed to convey Alexander’s unique appeal. From the very beginning of his film it’s clear that Oliver Stone has succumbed to the romance of Alexander, and wants us to, too. “It was an empire not of land or of gold but of the mind,” the aged Ptolemy muses aloud as he shuffles around his palace, which itself is a fairly typical mix of the scrupulously accurate and the inexplicably wrong. (The scrolls piled in the cubbyholes of his library rightly bear the little identifying tags that were the book jackets of the classical world; on the other hand, the tacky statuary on Ptolemy’s terrace looks suspiciously like the work of J. Seward Johnson Jr.) “I’ve known many great men in my life, but only one colossus,” he drones on, as a put-upon secretary scurries after him with a roll of papyrus. (He would, for what it’s worth, have been writing on an erasable wax tablet; costly papyrus was only for fair-copying.)

  You can’t help thinking that one reason you have to be told so explicitly and so often about the greatness of Alexander the Great is that the actor Stone has chosen to portray Alexander is incapable of conveying it himself. Colin Farrell is an Irishman with a sly, trickster’s face that betrays nothing of what may be going on behind it; in films like Phone Booth, in which he plays a sleazy PR executive, he has a skittish authenticity. It’s true that he shares certain physical characteristics with Alexander: like the Macedonian, the Irishman is small, a bantamweight who looks fast on his feet. (Alexander himself was such a good runner that for a while he was considered a candidate for the Olympic games, until he protested that he would compete only against kings.) But he simply doesn’t have the qualities necessary to suggest Alexander’s remarkable charisma. As he trudges through the film, earnestly spouting lines that describe what we know Alexander was thinking (“I’ve seen the future…these people want—need—change”), he looks more and more like what he in fact is: a Hibernian character actor with a shaggy-browed poker face trapped in a glamorous leading man’s part.