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Alexander, the Movie!
By Daniel Mendelsohn
The New York Review of Books
Dec 22 2004
Alexander
a film directed by Oliver Stone
1.
Whatever else you say about the career of Alexander the Great—and
classicists, at least, say quite a lot[1] —it was neither funny nor
dull. So it was a sign that something had gone seriously wrong with
Oliver Stone's long, gaudy, and curiously empty new biopic about
Alexander when audiences at both showings I attended greeted the
movie with snickering and obvious boredom. The first time I saw the
picture was at a press screening at a commercial theater, and even
from the large central section that was (a personage with a headset
informed us) reserved for "friends of the filmmaker" you could hear
frequent tittering throughout the film—understandable, given that the
characters often have to say things like "from these loins of war,
Alexander was born." A week later, a matinee suggested one likely
reaction by those unconstrained by the bonds of amity: at the end of
the three-hour-long movie, four of the twelve people in the audience
had left.
This was, obviously, not the reaction Stone was hoping for —nor
indeed the reaction that Alexander's life and career deserve, whether
you think he was an enlightened Greek gentleman carrying the torch of
Hellenism to the East or a savage, paranoid tyrant who left rivers of
blood in his wake. The controversy about his personality derives from
the fact that our sources are famously inadequate, all eyewitness
accounts having perished: what remains is, at best, secondhand (one
history, for instance, is based largely on the now-lost memoirs of
Alexander's general and alleged half-brother, Ptolemy, who went on to
become the founder of the Egyptian dynasty that ended with
Cleopatra), and at worst highly unreliable. A rather florid account
by the first-century-AD Roman rhetorician Quintus Curtius often
reflects its author's professional interests —his Alexander is given
to extended bursts of eloquence even when gravely wounded—far more
than it does the known facts. But Alexander's story, even stripped of
romanticizing or rhetorical elaboration, still has the power to
amaze.
He was born in 356 BC, the product of the stormy marriage between
Philip II of Macedon and his temperamental fourth wife, Olympias, a
princess from Epirus (a wild western kingdom encompassing parts of
present-day Albania). His childhood was appropriately dramatic. At
around twelve he had already gained a foothold on legend by taming a
magnificent but dangerously wild stallion called Bucephalas
("Oxhead")—a favorite episode in what would become, after Alexander's
death, a series of increasingly fantastical tales and legends that
finally coalesced into a literary narrative known as the Alexander
Romance, which as time passed was elaborated, illuminated, and
translated into everything from Latin to Armenian. While still in his
early teens, he was at school with no less a teacher than Aristotle,
who clearly made a great impression on the youth. Years later, as he
roamed restlessly through the world, Alexander took care to send
interesting zoological and botanical specimens back to his old tutor.
At sixteen he'd demonstrated enough ability to get himself appointed
regent when his father, a shrewd statesman and inspired general who
dreamed of leading a pan-Hellenic coalition against Persia, was on
campaign. He used this opportunity to make war on an unruly tribe on
Macedon's eastern border; to mark his victory he founded the first
city he named after himself, Alexandropolis. At eighteen, under his
father's generalship, he led the crack Macedonian cavalry to a
brilliant victory at the Battle of Chaeronea, where Macedon crushed
an Athenian-Theban coalition, thereby putting an end to southern
Greek opposition to Macedonian designs on hegemony. At twenty,
following the assassination of Philip—in which he (or Olympias, or
perhaps both) may have had a hand—he was king.
And that was just the beginning. At twenty-two, Alexander led his
father's superbly trained army across the Hellespont into Asia. Next
he liberated the Greek cities of Asia Minor from their Persian
overlords (i.e., made them his own: the governors he appointed were
not always champions of Hellenic civic freedoms), staged his most
brilliant military victory by successfully besieging the Phoenician
island fortress of Tyre (part of his strategy to "defeat the Persian
navy on land" by seizing its bases), and freed a grateful Egypt from
harsh Persian suzerainty. While in Egypt, he indulged in one of the
bizarre gestures that, wholly apart from his indisputable genius as a
general, helped make him a legend: he made an arduous and dangerous
detour to the oracle of Ammon in the desert oasis of Siwah, where the
god revealed that Alexander was in fact his own son—a conclusion with
which Alexander himself came more and more to agree. While in Egypt
he also founded the most famous of his Alexandrias, a city that
eventually displaced Athens as the center of Greek intellectual
culture, and where his marvelous tomb, a tourist attraction for
centuries after, would eventually rise.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 Gaugemela—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 Gaugemela in Mesopotamia in
October, 331 BC, 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 Gaugemela, 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, Uzbekhistan, 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," 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, and suffering the effects of his gravest wound to date, from
an arrow that pierced his lung during a battle with the Malli, a
fierce Indian tribe, Alexander relented and agreed to turn back.
The westward journey through the arid wastes of the Macran desert
toward Babylon, which he planned to make the capi-tal of his new
world empire, is often called his 1812: he lost tens of thousands of
the souls who set out with him during the two-month march. 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 legend-ary 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 Gaugemela, 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,[2] but far more likely of the cumulative
effects of swamp fever (he'd chosen, foolishly or perhaps
self-destructively, to pass the summer in 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 Grecification of the East, the reach of
Western culture, and 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 the added factor of 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-AD
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 yearning 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, 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.[3]
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 afterward.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Particularly striking was his openness to the new cultures to which
his conquests 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 (which
provoked a 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 archaic text, although not the one
Alexander associated himself with. He may have seen the Iliad as the
blueprint of his life, but 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.
2.
Much of the problem with Stone's movie arises because it is torn
between the facts of Alexander's life and the romance of his
personality—between showing you all the research that's been done
(there are fussy recreations of everything from Alexander's tactics
to Darius' toilette) and persuading you of Alexander's allure.
Between these two horses the movie falls, and never gets back on its
feet.
Much 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 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 to advise 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' beard to
the layout of the battle of Gaugemela, which at thirty minutes makes
up one fifth of the entire film, and which has been dutifully
recreated in all its noise and confusion, right down to the clouds of
orange dust 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
portraying 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 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 "lie
together in knowledge and virtue.") The absence of Greeks in the
movie is more than structurally incoherent: it is 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 is shown in a prologue
sequence that takes place in his palace in Alexandria, busily writing
his history forty years after Alexander's death. But the film misses
many crucial opportunities to dramatize its subject by lurching from
Alexander's youth to his victory at Gaugemela: there is nothing about
Egypt, no oracle at Siwah, an event of the highest importance and
well worth 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 Gaugemela, there are inexcusable omissions.
Where, you wonder, is Darius' mother; where, crucially, the mass
interracial wedding pageant at Susa? And what about the story of the
Gordian knot, a favorite that famously demonstrated 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 say nothing of
confusing to those who don't 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 know
about them. 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, 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.
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 like so many other directors 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 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 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' 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 is already disappearing from theaters—is that while it
dutifully represents certain events from Alexander's childhood to his
death, there's no dramatic arc, no shaping of the life 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.
3.
None of this would matter much if the film 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," 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.
You can't help thinking that one reason you're 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. 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'd only compete against
kings.) But he simply doesn't have the qualities necessary to suggest
Alexander's remarkable cha-risma. 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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The void at the center of this biopic must be especially embarrassing
to the filmmakers, given how much they made about another aspect of
the film's attempts at capturing "historical accuracy": the grueling
boot-camp training that Farrell and the actors playing his troops had
to go through in order (you assume) to lend his on-screen generalship
authenticity. The night before the press screening I attended, the
Discovery Channel aired a documentary entitled Becoming Alexander,
which showed Farrell jogging under the hot Moroccan sun with the
loyal extras and talking about the bond that had grown up between him
and the men whom he would be leading into cinematic battle. A
military expert hired to advise the filmmaker opined that, as a
result of this earnest process, Farrell had been transformed from "an
Irish street kid" into a "leader of men."
Whatever else it illuminates, the patent fatuity of this hype—if the
actor hadn't attended the boot camp, would the extras have disobeyed
his orders at Gaugemela?—suggests that Alexander gets at least one
thing across successfully: the vanity of the filmmakers. With its
dramatically meaningless detail and almost total failure to convey
the central allure of its subject, the film at least betrays its
creators' satisfaction with their own effort and expense—with, that
is to say, their ability to outdo other classical epics that have
sprung up since Gladiator was a hit a few years ago. But the reason
Gladiator was successful was not that its characters sported togas
and lolled about in Roman orgies, but that it had an irresistible
story: forbidden love, jealousy, murder, revenge. For all the talk of
authenticity and identification with the ancients on the part of the
director and actors responsible for Alexander, no one seems to have
paused to wonder, while they spent months and millions on recreating
the Battle of Gaugemela with ear-splitting, eye-popping
verisi-militude, whether the "accuracy" of such a reconstruction of
the classical past actually adds anything to our understanding of
that past—whether it helps tell the story or enhances our
appreciation of why Alexander may be more worth making a movie about
than other ancient conquerors. To my knowledge, there are no medieval
romances about Julius Caesar in Armenian.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If the above sounds disappointed, it is. I became a classicist
because of Alexander the Great: at thirteen I read Mary Renault's
intelligent and artful novels about Alexander, Fire from Heaven and
The Persian Boy (the latter told from the point of view of Bagoas the
eunuch), and I was hooked. Adolescence, after all, is about nothing
if not pothos; the combination of great deeds and strange cultures,
the romantic blend of the youthful hero, that Odyssean yearning,
strange rites, and panoramic moments—all spiced with a dash of
polymorphous perversity about which no one seemed to care—were too
alluring to resist. From that moment on all I wanted was to know more
about these Greeks. Naturally I've learned a great deal since then,
and know about, and largely believe, the revisionist views of
Alexander, the darker interpretation of the events I read about
thirty years ago in fictional form; but I will admit that a little of
that allure, that pothos, still clings to the story—and to the
Greeks—for me.
Soon after I read Renault's novels (from which, I couldn't help
noticing, a good deal in Stone's film is borrowed without credit, not
least a Freudian scene illuminating the sources of Alexander's hatred
of his father, and perhaps of his indifference to women), I wrote the
author a fan letter which I concluded by shyly hoping that she
wouldn't reply with a form letter. Her response, which was the
beginning of a correspondence that lasted until her death ten years
later, and which inspired me to go on and study Classics, came to my
mind when I was hearing Colin Farrell described as a leader of men in
Becoming Alexander. "I wonder," Miss Renault wrote to me in April
1976,
whoever told you I'd send you a "form letter" if you wrote to me. Are
there really writers who do that? I knew film stars do. You can't
blame them, really...about half the people who write to them must be
morons who think they really are Cleopatra or whoever.... Writers,
though, write to communicate; and when someone to whom one has got
through takes the trouble to write and tell one so, it would be
pretty ungrateful to respond with something off a duplicator.
Because filmmakers are now as addled as fans, this new fictionalized
Alexander isn't getting through to many people. I certainly doubt
that it will inspire some young bookish boy somewhere to be a
classicist, or a writer, or both.
Notes
[1] The scholar Waldemar Heckel, for instance, routinely updates the
bibliography he maintains at
hum.ucalgary.ca/wheckel/bibl/alex-bibl.pdf; it currently runs to
fifty-one single-spaced pages, numbering over twelve hundred items,
seven hundred of which have appeared since 1972.
[2] The scholarship just on the death of Alexander is itself vast,
and serves as a footnote to a long line of fanciful popular
conspiracy theories, the latest of which is Paul Doherty's The Death
of Alexander the Great: What—or Who— Really Killed the Young
Conqueror of the Known World? (Carroll and Graf, 2004), which
concludes that an ambitious Ptolemy, "intent on murder," poisoned the
King with arsenic.
[3] Cited in Paul Cartledge's Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New
Past (Overlook, 2004), p. 221.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17685
--Boundary_(ID_7w2l0b5Hwvskl+GmtUAxWw)--
By Daniel Mendelsohn
The New York Review of Books
Dec 22 2004
Alexander
a film directed by Oliver Stone
1.
Whatever else you say about the career of Alexander the Great—and
classicists, at least, say quite a lot[1] —it was neither funny nor
dull. So it was a sign that something had gone seriously wrong with
Oliver Stone's long, gaudy, and curiously empty new biopic about
Alexander when audiences at both showings I attended greeted the
movie with snickering and obvious boredom. The first time I saw the
picture was at a press screening at a commercial theater, and even
from the large central section that was (a personage with a headset
informed us) reserved for "friends of the filmmaker" you could hear
frequent tittering throughout the film—understandable, given that the
characters often have to say things like "from these loins of war,
Alexander was born." A week later, a matinee suggested one likely
reaction by those unconstrained by the bonds of amity: at the end of
the three-hour-long movie, four of the twelve people in the audience
had left.
This was, obviously, not the reaction Stone was hoping for —nor
indeed the reaction that Alexander's life and career deserve, whether
you think he was an enlightened Greek gentleman carrying the torch of
Hellenism to the East or a savage, paranoid tyrant who left rivers of
blood in his wake. The controversy about his personality derives from
the fact that our sources are famously inadequate, all eyewitness
accounts having perished: what remains is, at best, secondhand (one
history, for instance, is based largely on the now-lost memoirs of
Alexander's general and alleged half-brother, Ptolemy, who went on to
become the founder of the Egyptian dynasty that ended with
Cleopatra), and at worst highly unreliable. A rather florid account
by the first-century-AD Roman rhetorician Quintus Curtius often
reflects its author's professional interests —his Alexander is given
to extended bursts of eloquence even when gravely wounded—far more
than it does the known facts. But Alexander's story, even stripped of
romanticizing or rhetorical elaboration, still has the power to
amaze.
He was born in 356 BC, the product of the stormy marriage between
Philip II of Macedon and his temperamental fourth wife, Olympias, a
princess from Epirus (a wild western kingdom encompassing parts of
present-day Albania). His childhood was appropriately dramatic. At
around twelve he had already gained a foothold on legend by taming a
magnificent but dangerously wild stallion called Bucephalas
("Oxhead")—a favorite episode in what would become, after Alexander's
death, a series of increasingly fantastical tales and legends that
finally coalesced into a literary narrative known as the Alexander
Romance, which as time passed was elaborated, illuminated, and
translated into everything from Latin to Armenian. While still in his
early teens, he was at school with no less a teacher than Aristotle,
who clearly made a great impression on the youth. Years later, as he
roamed restlessly through the world, Alexander took care to send
interesting zoological and botanical specimens back to his old tutor.
At sixteen he'd demonstrated enough ability to get himself appointed
regent when his father, a shrewd statesman and inspired general who
dreamed of leading a pan-Hellenic coalition against Persia, was on
campaign. He used this opportunity to make war on an unruly tribe on
Macedon's eastern border; to mark his victory he founded the first
city he named after himself, Alexandropolis. At eighteen, under his
father's generalship, he led the crack Macedonian cavalry to a
brilliant victory at the Battle of Chaeronea, where Macedon crushed
an Athenian-Theban coalition, thereby putting an end to southern
Greek opposition to Macedonian designs on hegemony. At twenty,
following the assassination of Philip—in which he (or Olympias, or
perhaps both) may have had a hand—he was king.
And that was just the beginning. At twenty-two, Alexander led his
father's superbly trained army across the Hellespont into Asia. Next
he liberated the Greek cities of Asia Minor from their Persian
overlords (i.e., made them his own: the governors he appointed were
not always champions of Hellenic civic freedoms), staged his most
brilliant military victory by successfully besieging the Phoenician
island fortress of Tyre (part of his strategy to "defeat the Persian
navy on land" by seizing its bases), and freed a grateful Egypt from
harsh Persian suzerainty. While in Egypt, he indulged in one of the
bizarre gestures that, wholly apart from his indisputable genius as a
general, helped make him a legend: he made an arduous and dangerous
detour to the oracle of Ammon in the desert oasis of Siwah, where the
god revealed that Alexander was in fact his own son—a conclusion with
which Alexander himself came more and more to agree. While in Egypt
he also founded the most famous of his Alexandrias, a city that
eventually displaced Athens as the center of Greek intellectual
culture, and where his marvelous tomb, a tourist attraction for
centuries after, would eventually rise.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 Gaugemela—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 Gaugemela in Mesopotamia in
October, 331 BC, 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 Gaugemela, 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, Uzbekhistan, 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," 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, and suffering the effects of his gravest wound to date, from
an arrow that pierced his lung during a battle with the Malli, a
fierce Indian tribe, Alexander relented and agreed to turn back.
The westward journey through the arid wastes of the Macran desert
toward Babylon, which he planned to make the capi-tal of his new
world empire, is often called his 1812: he lost tens of thousands of
the souls who set out with him during the two-month march. 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 legend-ary 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 Gaugemela, 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,[2] but far more likely of the cumulative
effects of swamp fever (he'd chosen, foolishly or perhaps
self-destructively, to pass the summer in 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 Grecification of the East, the reach of
Western culture, and 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 the added factor of 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-AD
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 yearning 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, 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.[3]
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 afterward.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Particularly striking was his openness to the new cultures to which
his conquests 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 (which
provoked a 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 archaic text, although not the one
Alexander associated himself with. He may have seen the Iliad as the
blueprint of his life, but 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.
2.
Much of the problem with Stone's movie arises because it is torn
between the facts of Alexander's life and the romance of his
personality—between showing you all the research that's been done
(there are fussy recreations of everything from Alexander's tactics
to Darius' toilette) and persuading you of Alexander's allure.
Between these two horses the movie falls, and never gets back on its
feet.
Much 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 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 to advise 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' beard to
the layout of the battle of Gaugemela, which at thirty minutes makes
up one fifth of the entire film, and which has been dutifully
recreated in all its noise and confusion, right down to the clouds of
orange dust 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
portraying 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 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 "lie
together in knowledge and virtue.") The absence of Greeks in the
movie is more than structurally incoherent: it is 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 is shown in a prologue
sequence that takes place in his palace in Alexandria, busily writing
his history forty years after Alexander's death. But the film misses
many crucial opportunities to dramatize its subject by lurching from
Alexander's youth to his victory at Gaugemela: there is nothing about
Egypt, no oracle at Siwah, an event of the highest importance and
well worth 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 Gaugemela, there are inexcusable omissions.
Where, you wonder, is Darius' mother; where, crucially, the mass
interracial wedding pageant at Susa? And what about the story of the
Gordian knot, a favorite that famously demonstrated 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 say nothing of
confusing to those who don't 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 know
about them. 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, 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.
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 like so many other directors 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 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 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' 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 is already disappearing from theaters—is that while it
dutifully represents certain events from Alexander's childhood to his
death, there's no dramatic arc, no shaping of the life 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.
3.
None of this would matter much if the film 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," 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.
You can't help thinking that one reason you're 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. 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'd only compete against
kings.) But he simply doesn't have the qualities necessary to suggest
Alexander's remarkable cha-risma. 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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The void at the center of this biopic must be especially embarrassing
to the filmmakers, given how much they made about another aspect of
the film's attempts at capturing "historical accuracy": the grueling
boot-camp training that Farrell and the actors playing his troops had
to go through in order (you assume) to lend his on-screen generalship
authenticity. The night before the press screening I attended, the
Discovery Channel aired a documentary entitled Becoming Alexander,
which showed Farrell jogging under the hot Moroccan sun with the
loyal extras and talking about the bond that had grown up between him
and the men whom he would be leading into cinematic battle. A
military expert hired to advise the filmmaker opined that, as a
result of this earnest process, Farrell had been transformed from "an
Irish street kid" into a "leader of men."
Whatever else it illuminates, the patent fatuity of this hype—if the
actor hadn't attended the boot camp, would the extras have disobeyed
his orders at Gaugemela?—suggests that Alexander gets at least one
thing across successfully: the vanity of the filmmakers. With its
dramatically meaningless detail and almost total failure to convey
the central allure of its subject, the film at least betrays its
creators' satisfaction with their own effort and expense—with, that
is to say, their ability to outdo other classical epics that have
sprung up since Gladiator was a hit a few years ago. But the reason
Gladiator was successful was not that its characters sported togas
and lolled about in Roman orgies, but that it had an irresistible
story: forbidden love, jealousy, murder, revenge. For all the talk of
authenticity and identification with the ancients on the part of the
director and actors responsible for Alexander, no one seems to have
paused to wonder, while they spent months and millions on recreating
the Battle of Gaugemela with ear-splitting, eye-popping
verisi-militude, whether the "accuracy" of such a reconstruction of
the classical past actually adds anything to our understanding of
that past—whether it helps tell the story or enhances our
appreciation of why Alexander may be more worth making a movie about
than other ancient conquerors. To my knowledge, there are no medieval
romances about Julius Caesar in Armenian.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If the above sounds disappointed, it is. I became a classicist
because of Alexander the Great: at thirteen I read Mary Renault's
intelligent and artful novels about Alexander, Fire from Heaven and
The Persian Boy (the latter told from the point of view of Bagoas the
eunuch), and I was hooked. Adolescence, after all, is about nothing
if not pothos; the combination of great deeds and strange cultures,
the romantic blend of the youthful hero, that Odyssean yearning,
strange rites, and panoramic moments—all spiced with a dash of
polymorphous perversity about which no one seemed to care—were too
alluring to resist. From that moment on all I wanted was to know more
about these Greeks. Naturally I've learned a great deal since then,
and know about, and largely believe, the revisionist views of
Alexander, the darker interpretation of the events I read about
thirty years ago in fictional form; but I will admit that a little of
that allure, that pothos, still clings to the story—and to the
Greeks—for me.
Soon after I read Renault's novels (from which, I couldn't help
noticing, a good deal in Stone's film is borrowed without credit, not
least a Freudian scene illuminating the sources of Alexander's hatred
of his father, and perhaps of his indifference to women), I wrote the
author a fan letter which I concluded by shyly hoping that she
wouldn't reply with a form letter. Her response, which was the
beginning of a correspondence that lasted until her death ten years
later, and which inspired me to go on and study Classics, came to my
mind when I was hearing Colin Farrell described as a leader of men in
Becoming Alexander. "I wonder," Miss Renault wrote to me in April
1976,
whoever told you I'd send you a "form letter" if you wrote to me. Are
there really writers who do that? I knew film stars do. You can't
blame them, really...about half the people who write to them must be
morons who think they really are Cleopatra or whoever.... Writers,
though, write to communicate; and when someone to whom one has got
through takes the trouble to write and tell one so, it would be
pretty ungrateful to respond with something off a duplicator.
Because filmmakers are now as addled as fans, this new fictionalized
Alexander isn't getting through to many people. I certainly doubt
that it will inspire some young bookish boy somewhere to be a
classicist, or a writer, or both.
Notes
[1] The scholar Waldemar Heckel, for instance, routinely updates the
bibliography he maintains at
hum.ucalgary.ca/wheckel/bibl/alex-bibl.pdf; it currently runs to
fifty-one single-spaced pages, numbering over twelve hundred items,
seven hundred of which have appeared since 1972.
[2] The scholarship just on the death of Alexander is itself vast,
and serves as a footnote to a long line of fanciful popular
conspiracy theories, the latest of which is Paul Doherty's The Death
of Alexander the Great: What—or Who— Really Killed the Young
Conqueror of the Known World? (Carroll and Graf, 2004), which
concludes that an ambitious Ptolemy, "intent on murder," poisoned the
King with arsenic.
[3] Cited in Paul Cartledge's Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New
Past (Overlook, 2004), p. 221.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17685
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