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ALEXANDER THE GREAT IN MYTH AND HISTORY

A lecture given by Dr Douglas Kelly, Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the ANU,

to the Friends of the ANU Classics Museum, on 3 March 2005

 

Three hours and ten minutes of the film Alexander the Great allowed Oliver Stone, and his historical consultant, Robin Lane Fox of Oxford, to give only a sketchy and selective outline of Alexander’s meteoric career. The following lecture will be even more selective and sketchier: it will in no way do full justice to Alexander and it will not attempt to undo all the damage to his image from Oliver Stone and Lane Fox. It is part, of course, of the widespread interest in Alexander revived by the recent film. This interest has always run strong. From the seventies onwards, when publishing became a heavy industry, we could almost expect a book on Alexander a year. In the last eighteen months there have been at least seven, including a couple that should find place in the largest and glossiest section of the bookshop, that devoted to self-improvement and business success: Partha Sarathi Bose, Alexander’s Art of Strategy: The Timeless Leadership Lessons of History’s Greatest Empire Builder (Gotham Books, 2003) and Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, The Confessions of Alexander the Great (Granicus Books). Any suspicion that these books are being invented as a leg-pull may be allayed by reference to Amazon.com. What we have here is an uninhibited desire to cash in on Alexander. If both MBA students and the upwardly aspirational expected or hope to learn from the Alexander the Great case study how to set clear goals and motivate their underlings, we may feel we have finally seen a fulfilment of one of Karl Marx’s prophecies, that one of how history begins as tragedy and ends as farce.

Born in 356 BC and dying just short of his thirty-third birthday in 323 BC, Alexander had in this short lifetime changed world history. To understand such a far-reaching shift in world affairs we may turn to an episode some twenty two years after his death which marks in some revealing ways the end of Alexander’s era. In 301 BC at the battle of Ipsos in central Asia Minor Antigonos the One Eyed failed in his grandiose attempt to unite Alexander’s empire under a single personal rule (his own).
Antigonos the One Eyed was then a tough old veteran aged 80: he had campaigned with Alexander’s father Philip and he had served in and survived in the whole of Alexander’s Asian wars. All the rest of Alexander’s successors combined against him, holding their strategy session before Alexander’s empty throne. Ipsos is the biggest land battle in history between Greek and Macedonian troops: over 150,000 took part. Antigonos had the same Great Idea as Alexander, a world empire. He also sought to use the same military means as Alexander had applied in three of his four great pitched battles, at Issos, Gaugamela and on the Hydaspes River, against a massed enemy in superior numbers: holding the infantry with his own phalanx until his forces cleared away the enemy cavalry and light troops to shatter the enemy with a crushing cavalry charge from the right.

Like all military tactics this is simple in concept but horrendously difficult in practice: it required highly trained and disciplined troops and a leader who could both lead from the front and keep his head and his sense of timing to throw the cavalry in at the right time and place. Alexander could do it. At Ipsos Antigonos’s cavalry was under the command of his son Demetrios, recklessly brave, dashingly handsome, self-confident, but not a complete Alexander. Demetrios swept away the enemy cavalry but pursued too far and could not turn his men round soon enough. He lacked Alexander’s ability to seize the fleeting moment and he lacked Alexander’s luck. There was time for a force of 500 elephants to block his way and old Antigonos was left surrounded; he fought to the death as a tough old marshal of Philip and Alexander’s would. As he died with his boots on, he was heard to keep saying up to the end, “My son is coming.”

So ended the twofold legacy of Alexander, the Great Idea of a world empire and the military genius that could make such a dream a reality. No Hellenistic monarch or warlord was ever to aspire to the whole of Alexander’s empire or to attempt to break an enemy army with an Alexander-style cavalry charge. Alexander was unique and the mixture in him of genius, charisma, intellect and effectiveness has made his personality fascinating across the ages. Very few men, and no woman except his formidable mother Olympias, was close to him. Alexander published no speeches and wrote no memoirs. As he became increasingly highhanded and autocratic in his later years he explained less and less of his aims to his circle. Alexander never hesitated and only once in his life did he change an order. This was at the royal Persian capital of Persepolis in the winter of 330/29.

Alexander had let his troops plunder the town some weeks before. Now at a drunken party he was prompted by a very high-priced Athenian call-girl, or “courtesan" as classicists used rather decorously to style them, to burn down the palace in revenge for the Persian sack of Athens back in 480 BC. Alexander agreed and the arson began. After all, from the very beginning Alexander had advertised the war in Asia as revenge for the Persian invasion of Greece and the destruction of Greek, that is mainly Athenian, temples. Serious-minded historians in modern times have explained the burning of Persepolis as a deliberate act of political symbolism, to convey to the Greek world the fulfilment of the original war aims. Such interpretations play down the amount of hard drinking and bizarre behaviour in Alexander’s court , though admittedly this was to reach its increasingly high plateau in the last three years. They also miss another key element in the situation: by winter 330/29, Alexander was beginning to act not simply as King of Macedonia and leader of the Greek allies but as Great King of Asia and legitimate successor of the Persian monarchy, with an increasing resort to the style and trappings of Persian royalty. So late in the night’s revelry at Persepolis the unusual or rather the unparalleled happened. Alexander changed his mind and gave orders to put the fire out. He was later to use the blackened shell of the Persepolis palace for court ceremonial on his return from India.

A man of unique gifts, who never explained himself and was not given to self-analysis or policy debate, was not going to be easily understood by those around him. Those outside the court circle would have felt more bafflement and fascination as they were further from the centre of power. As always happens with the great and powerful, gossip, rumour, stories, embroidery of stories and tall stories clustered around this exciting figure with ever-growing excitement and intensity as Alexander kept following one outstanding and seemingly miraculous success or impossible feat with another.

To illustrate this historical problem or rather historical quagmire of documenting Alexander, let alone understanding him, we may recall here an incident that created a brief stir in the media last November, just before the release of Oliver Stone’s film. A group of lawyers in Greece announced their intention of prosecuting Oliver Stone for depicting Alexander’s relationship with his close friend from boyhood, Hephaestion, as homosexual. I do not know under what head of legislation the case was to be brought and have heard nothing of it since. Perhaps, as could be expected without too much cynicism, Oliver Stone’s publicity people had a hand in this. In any case the episode is a useful reminder of the place that Alexander holds in the Greek people’s historical consciousness as a Champion of Hellenism. Since there has probably been little philately in Friends’ meetings, there can be brief mention here of stamps issued in Greece on 27 April, 1968, to celebrate an exhibition in Athens on the “Hellenic Fight for Civilization”. In this issue Alexander is one of eight heroes, and he has figured on more Greek stamps than even Lord Byron.

To go back to our lawyers suing Oliver Stone, they reportedly pointed out quite correctly that all surviving accounts of Alexander were written centuries after his death. As regards the earliest, Diodorus Siculus (late first century BC), there is a gap of some three hundred years between him and Alexander, and five hundred years between Alexander and our most respectable source, Arrian, in the second century AD. Our lawyers went on to point out that the "official" accounts of Alexander are lost and they apparently believed that these would have vindicated Alexander from any allegations of unseemly behaviour. I am not sure what was meant here by official accounts. Not Alexander’s court historian, Kallisthenes, nephew of Aristotle, who accompanied the expedition as its historian from the beginning but never finished his work. He fell out of favour early in 327 for his unconcealed opposition to Alexander’s demand that his court circle extend to him the gesture of veneration known as proskunesis. This piece of etiquette involved some kneeling or bending, or even prostrating oneself, and also kissing the hands while pointing them to the honorand. Greeks and Macedonians did this only while praying to or reverencing the gods; Asiatics of all ranks, including the Persian nobility, had performed this action with varying degrees of grovelling, gradated according to their rank, to honour the Great King of Persia. The ceremony lapsed after Kallisthenes openly voiced the amusement or disgust that most Greeks and Macedonians felt but Kallisthenes paid the price. He was imprisoned and died some months later in captivity, of natural causes assisted by his prison conditions. His History of Alexander’s campaigns was given out to the world in incomplete form, and Alexander, who sensibly allowed his public relations only to handled by writers and artists of the first rank, did not recruit another court historian.

Or did our Greek lawyers mean the Ephemerides, the Court Daily Gazette that is quoted by our surviving sources only for details of Alexander’s fatal ten-day illness from 1-10 June, 323? Some Alexander scholars have firmly declared their faith in the authenticity of this document and in a leap of faith have further declared that it provides an underlying bedrock of authentic record beneath all the colourful and contradictory narratives in our late sources. That is, they edit out all the sensational sex, violence and megalomania from these late accounts and find a satisfactory residue that they regard as true history. These are serious-minded, often earnest souls whose unshaken faith in the rectitude of their own presuppositions would not allow the nagging doubt that they were creating the past as a reflection of their own image.

But over and above the matter of the degree of conformity and respectable conventionality in the historian’s mind, there is a grave difficulty of historical method, over which even the most blissful optimist must occasionally squirm: the Ephemerides mention a visit by some of Alexander’s friends to a temple of Serapis in Babylon for incubation: that is they went to the temple to have a dream sent to them by the god to advise on how to treat Alexander’s illness. The problem is that Serapis is a Greek version of an Egyptian god fostered by King Ptolemy in Egypt, many miles from Babylon and also at least thirty years after Alexander’s death. The Court Daily Gazette is a problem. Its early bulletins on Alexander’s condition are as reassuring as some of those produced recently on the condition of His Holiness Pope John-Paul II.
However the problem of the Ephemerides goes far deeper than merely the reassuring tone of official blandness. The alleged document has, so to speak, been doctored, if not forged from whole cloth to prove to the world that Alexander died of natural causes, in a prolonged and worsening illness, and not, as was believed in some quarters both at the time and later, by poisoning.

Our ancient sources on Alexander are a mess. There are numerous discrepancies and contradictions in them. Some recount incidents and episodes that others ignore or omit and they each give conflicting accounts not only of Alexander’s motives but also of many of his actions. They each put their own gloss on his behaviour and there is no one picture of Alexander the man. Long ago it was found that sifting out from our sources whatever an historian found improbable or distasteful got nowhere. For sexual excess, random violence and megalomania have been known to happen from time to time. The historian’s problem with Alexander the Great is to discern amidst a mass of tendentious fabrication when something is well attested, even if it is odd or repugnant. None of the works of those historians, memoir-writers and pamphleteers who wrote about Alexander in his own time or the next generation or two has survived. As was said before, we have only much later works deriving from these lost books. Yet the names of these lost writers figure freely in discussion of Alexander history and some scholars today seem to know them not as ghosts but as intimate friends. Certainly there are scholars, not all of them Germans or PhD students, who can tell you positively what was in and what as not in a book that has been lost and that no one today can read. Not all source-criticism is on quite the same level as necromancy or séances with mediums but verifiable results are few and certainty seldom obtainable.

Here we may refer to Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals who sensibly carved himself out a kingdom in Egypt in the chaos after Alexander’s death. He also astutely purloined Alexander’s corpse when an enormous catafalque was taking it back to Macedonia. A man who survives a generation of internecine wars and who pinches Alexander’s body is not, to say the least, a simple and straightforward character. King Ptolemy in his capital in Alexandria in Egypt is used by Oliver Stone to provide a narrative framework for his film. Ptolemy did write a History of Alexander so this was the right choice as far as it went, but like much of the film it did not go far enough in the right direction.

In the second century AD Arrian, a Greek from Nicomedia in Asia Minor, a man with a distinguished record of military and political service in the Roman empire, also a leading man of letters in his day, declared that Alexander had been badly served by historians: they were mostly bad and consequently the reading public was unfamiliar with Alexander’s true history. Out of this crowd he chose two as his main sources, professing to treat what the rest said as more or less mere hearsay, perhaps worth recording but not worth believing. The two he chose were King Ptolemy, who figures in the film, and one Aristoboulos, who served Alexander as a minor official and engineer, and who also wrote a History of Alexander but who is not in the film. Arrian indicates that where necessary he gives preference to Ptolemy over Aristoboulos on the interesting but hardly persuasive grounds that Ptolemy was a king and kings do not lie.

Apparently generals who founded monarchies are more veracious then mere engineers. Certainly Aristoboulos had a reputation in antiquity for flattering his old chief. For instance, he denied in the teeth of abundant evidence that Alexander was a heavy drinker, even by Macedonian standards. Arrian had a problem with these two sources. Ptolemy and Aristoboulos disagreed often and over matters of importance. As far was we can tell, Arrian did not deal consistently and systematically with the numerous disagreements between his two main sources. Arrian also does seem to have been sufficiently disturbed by the fact that his two favourite and preferred sources should have disagreed so much on matters of both interpretation, which was bad enough, but also on significant matters of fact, which is or should have been alarming.

Let us consider a revealing example of this perplexing state of the sources. Early in 331 BC after occupying Egypt and founding Alexandria, Alexander went with a small party on a march of some 360 kilometres south from the coast through the Libyan desert to the Great Oasis of Siwah, where there was the oracle shrine of the god Greeks called Zeus Ammon. Greeks had been travelling there for at least a hundred years but the route was not easy and just before Alexander’s march storms had obliterated much of the track. Alexander made it through unscathed, another example, it was felt, of his daring and good luck. But to the Greek mind daring and even more good luck did not come about merely because of human activity.

Daring and good luck of the kind that Alexander consistently combined were something uncanny and it was easy to suspect that some divine intervention was behind this. Our truthful king Ptolemy rose to the occasion: Arrian tells us that Alexander owed his safe arrival to the guidance provided by a pair of articulate snakes that led the army through the trackless waste and that it was Alexander who recognized the divine sign that these ear-catching reptiles provided. (Arrian’s description of these snakes is ambiguous; it could mean either "hissing their natural sound” or “speaking with human voice”. Editors and commentators, however, do not seem interested.) Aristoboulos the engineer was more prosaic: he agreed with the account found in most authors that the necessary guidance was provided by a pair of crows, apparently not articulate, that flew in the right direction. Even more humdrum is the Roman Alexander historian of uncertain date, Curtius Rufus, who says that Alexander spotted the route to the oasis when he saw a flock of birds suddenly flying into the air, which as every Australian should know is the best way to spot a water-source in the desert. How to sort out this tangle of contradictions? Arrian is sure that Alexander had some divine help to get to Siwah but he could not tell what exactly it was, given all the different accounts in his sources.

If there was disagreement over how Alexander got to Siwah there was going to be more about what questions he put to the oracle and what he was told, if he asked the question, about who his father really was. Now a man of superhuman gifts and successes obviously, in the common belief of the time, had an unusual relationship with divine power. Greek folk belief knew that Zeus, father of the gods, had also fathered many human beings and in particular the great hero and warrior Hercules had both a mortal man and immortal Zeus for a father, whether conventional or biological. Alexander was a religious man. So was almost everyone at the time: except for a few atheists and deviants you could almost count on the fingers of one hand, every Greek and Macedonian believed in the gods, in the necessity of appeasing the gods by cult and worship and in the possibility that somehow gods could intervene in human affairs.

People differed in the degree to which they followed or thought about such beliefs in any particular context but throughout his campaigns Alexander was scrupulous in carrying out rituals of sacrifice and divination; he subsidized existing Greek temples, founded new ones and was respectful of foreign cult. On numerous occasions, he held celebrations to honour the gods and to thank them for success; we are talking here of festivals extending over days or even a week of prayers, sacrifices, processions and, that essentially Greek form of divine service, athletic, equestrian and cultural competitions.

In short Alexander, no sophisticated sceptic, could readily come to believe that he was the son of Zeus. He and everyone else knew that was descended from Zeus: like every noble and royal prince he had a pedigree that went back to a god. Was there more to his parentage than this? It was not too great a step from having a god as an ancestor to having one as a parent if one was, like Alexander, overrunning the known world. Contemporaries seem to have believed that the purpose of this journey to Siwah was to clear up his parentage. In the mutiny outside Babylon in the late summer of 324, the loyalty and discipline of the Macedonian rank and file finally cracked after the hardships of the campaigning in India and the horrors of the march back. The last straw was when Alexander began the mass recruiting of Iranians into the elite infantry and cavalry. Angry Macedonian troops told Alexander that they were going home and if he wanted to make war he could do it with his father Ammon. So the belief that Alexander believed he was son of a god was, to say the least, current in the army. What we miss in our sources is any fine-grained account of how any belief in his divine kinship affected Alexander and his relations with his circle over time. As it is, Arrian says diplomatically and evasively that at Siwah Alexander got from Zeus Ammon the answer that he wanted and then adds that Ptolemy and Aristoboulos differed on the route Alexander took back to Alexandria.

As so often with Alexander’s mind and personality, the historian stands baffled, unable to get beyond a certain, unsatisfying, distance. Yet if history is baffled, gossip and sensationalism have always thrived. There was brief mention before of the furore, if that is what it was, over the matter of Alexander’s homosexual relationship with Hephaistion. The history of sex, a recent development in the discipline, is still one in which it is difficult to lay aside assumptions about what is natural and acceptable. I trust that our litigious lawyers in Greece had worked out a way of dealing with the evidence for male homosexuality in the social code of Alexander and his peers in the Macedonian nobility. In brief the personal and social life of these gentlemen was as follows: they had wives and concubines for producing sons and heirs and marriageable daughters; mistresses and usually younger males for sexual partners; and close male friends with whom they had grown up from boyhood and with whom their relationship was openly emotional, tactile and demonstrative in ways that might surprise the correct Anglo-Saxon, if any such still exist. Oliver Stone had to show us some rather chaste embraces between Hephaistion and Alexander and had his Ptolemy tell us in a voice-over that Alexander was only ever conquered by Hephaistion’s thighs. The Alexander literature is so various that finding one’s way about it can be troublesome and I report with regret that tracking down this colourful dictum is made even more difficult by one of Robin Lane Fox’s more impenetrable Endnotes. ( R Lane Fox, Alexander the Great, [Futura, London, 1973], p. 573, lines 7ff. The determined source-checker is advised to disregard the reference to Diogenes Laertius as a false trail, to get hold of R. Hercher (ed.), Epistolographi Graecae [1873], and then to ask if there is anything worth quoting as historical evidence in the novelettish "letters" that some scribbler concocted c. AD 200 for Diogenes, the cynic who used to live in a tub.)

Were Alexander and Hephaistion more than friends, that is, lovers? Perhaps they were in early adolescence, though we do not actually know that such conduct was permitted or what Alexander’s notoriously strict schoolmaster Lysimachos would have said about it. In the opening year of the expedition Alexander and Hephaistion went to Troy and somewhat stagily acted out their roles, one as the new Achilles and the other as the new Patroklos. The Homeric role-playing was on a far more extravagant scale in Babylon in 324 when Hephaistion drank himself to death: surpassing Achilles’ grief for the dead Patroklos, Alexander lamented over the corpse for three days without taking any food and then set about spending 10,000 talents on his friend’s funeral, as well as arranging for his solemnization as a hero or divine being through a special oracle response obtained from Zeus Ammon at Siwah. To men of the world and to others at the time, Achilles and Patroklos in Homer’s Iliad were homosexual lovers but, it must be added, as men of the world at the time did add, lovers of a very decent and honourable kind. At least, so said the Athenian orator Aeschines to an Athenian jury of several hundred citizens in 346 BC when he was prosecuting a rival politician on a morals charge, in fact on one involving male prostitution. Aeschines also boasted to the jury about the gallant figure that he himself cut with fashionable youths around the town’s gymnasiums, so he must be allowed to count as an expert, at least in the field of popular belief on Achilles and Patroklos, if not on the higher reaches of Homeric criticism.

Also in the credits of the Oliver Stone film and played by a handsome olive-complexioned youth, whose costume seems to have effected some economies in the wardrobe department, is one Bagoas. This actor has no speaking lines but Alexander does say to him, "I’ll take my bath myself, Bagoas”. This is when Alexander has occupied the royal Persian palace at Babylon and is now encountering oriental luxury. In fact we have just had a harem scene with every available starlet and female extra in states of undress reclining or writhing under ostrich-plume fans, a scene that recalls the best excesses of Cecil B. de Mille. That scene was thought fit for our eyes, but Bagoas seems to have been written out of the script.

Bagoas was a young eunuch whom Alexander found in the Persian palace where he had been one of the favourites of King Dareios. He took a liking to him and made him his body servant and, so scandal said, his toy-boy. Bagoas turned out to be also expert at palace intrigue and quick to resent any omission of himself from the gift list that was compulsory for any Persian grandee seeking to do business with Alexander. He even engineered the crucifixion of one of Alexander’s Persian officials, a brother of King Dareios, and his rival in palace intrigue. His influence with Alexander was resented by the Macedonian nobles and after Alexander’s death Bagoas seem to have had the good sense to drop hastily out of history. The doyen of Alexander historians, Sir William Tarn, declared Bagoas a fiction, invented and embellished by Alexander’s numerous enemies. Tarn regarded Alexander pretty much as the perfect English gentleman, chivalrous to opponents and courteous to women. There was no room for a Persian boy in or out of bed with Tarn’s Alexander, but by the way Tarn held it to be axiomatic that all these hostile slanders of Alexander saw the light of day only after the death of Alexander, that chivalrous and courteous gentleman.

Also perhaps left on the cutting room floor by Oliver Stone is the grievance of Pausanius (sic). He is the man who assassinates Alexander’s father Philip in the theatre. Not even W.W. Tarn could jettison the tale of how Pausanias was dumped as a lover by Attalos, father of the new bride Eurydice whom Philip marries to the outrage of Olympias and her son. When Pausanias complained to Attalos he was pack-raped by Attalos’s stable boys. When he complained to Philip, the king was unwilling to offend his new father-in-law and fobbed him off with the Macedonian equivalent of it being time to move on. This was unwise. Pausanias was one of the seven young nobles who served as the King’s personal body guard. He took his revenge, and in the film his motive is left unexplained. However, in the scene of Philip’s wedding to Attalos’s daughter, before the quarrel between father and son, you may have noticed in back left a male in a state of undress being maltreated on a table or couch by a gang of young toughs. This is not just some local colour about Macedonian court life but a piece of plot, namely the outrage that made Pausanias take revenge on Philip that has been discarded, not, it may be hoped, out of fear of court proceedings by Greek lawyers. Even so the film leaves unexplained why Philip’s assassin is so jittery or even why he is killing Philip at all.

It may be seen that there are formidable problems of evidence in the history of Alexander the Great and that for the historically minded cinema-goer these problems are compounded by the difficulty that film, at times a most unsubtle medium, has in presenting a culture that is remote and alien and a man who stands outside the normal run of humanity. Ancient writers on Alexander had but equally vexatious problems both in ascertaining the facts and in presenting them. There was no balanced and objective writing about Alexander in his generation or the one after: instead, there was eulogy, flattery, whitewash and, on the other hand, denunciation and hostile misrepresentation. To the possible disappointment of Greek lawyers out to sue Oliver Stone, there was no "official" account of Alexander and, if there had been, it would not have stopped tongues from wagging.

Later writers in antiquity, remote in time and living in more settled and stable times, did not have the systematic historical scholarship to make sense of conflicting sources, though at least two of them, Arrian and Plutarch, deserve some credit for what they did. But there is also a dark side: from antiquity we have a mass of stories known by the general title of Alexander Romance. This collection, or rather these collections, of stories have little to do with the nitty gritty of Alexander’s life and campaigns. Instead they tell us strange things from the realm of folklore or fairy tale.

In these stories Alexander is the son of an Egyptian conjuror and charlatan who dupes Olympias into thinking he is Zeus. The famous horse Boukephalos is a brute that eats human flesh until Alexander tames him. Alexander soon leaves the King of Persia’s daughter to go off in search of the one-eyed men and the man-eating monsters. He invented a submarine or diving bell to explore the depths of the ocean, for to him nothing is impossible. So too he explores the upper air in a flying-machine powered by hawks tethered to it and chasing pieces of meat on the end of sticks. He even goes out beyond the fringe of the world to search for the Water of Eternal Life.

One may wonder why these fantasies were multiplied and repeatedly circulated in antiquity, as if the record of Alexander’s own colourful and exciting career were not enough for readers. Classicists have largely ignored the Alexander Romance, though in its multiple later version it is more familiar to mediaevalists and to scholars of Asian cultures. For it has no historical value about Alexander himself, and it suffers from the further disadvantages to the orthodox classicist mind of being late and popular. The Romance is also so defiantly pagan as to have no interest for scholars concerned with that late and popular shift in ancient culture, namely Christianity.

The question remains when did this popular prose fiction begin. The standard view is to place its beginnings no earlier than the second century AD at the earliest, on the hardly persuasive grounds that there were unlikely to have been any hack writers and low-brow readers of Da Vinci Code stuff in antiquity before then.

Perhaps not, for here is one straw in the wind that suggests otherwise. In the late 1st c. AD the renegade Jew Flavius Josephus wrote an historical work, Jewish Antiquities, explaining to a goyim audience the history of the Jewish people and based upon the Sacred Scriptures and sundry Greek and Jewish historians. Josephus presents his readers with an account of something that never happened: Alexander visits Jerusalem in 331, falls down before the High Priest because he wishes to worship Yahweh, listens to a reading of the Book of Daniel with its prophesy of his conquest of the Persian empire, confirms for ever the rights and privileges of the Jewish state and goes on his way a happy and just man.

All this is fiction, as much as the Alexander Romance, even if it is cleverer and rather more openly tendentious. Yet Josephus did not make it up: he found it in his secular sources and offered it in good faith. That such falsification about Alexander could circulate amongst one interest group is not surprising if we consider how falsification, perhaps not as blatant but equally vexatious, had long since penetrated mainstream historical writing on Alexander. Where historians led the way, the propagandists and romancers followed and it seems that in its earliest form the Alexander Romance found both materials and encouragement in the efforts of historians.

So perhaps a viewing of Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great might encourage some stalwart scholars to try to make further progress in draining the swamp of the Alexander history; it might also encourage stalwarts to work on the shifting images of Alexander in popular as well as academic culture. But there is a drawback. It has been said that very few classicists write autobiographies, only in fact the most confident and brazen; others however put out autobiographies under the guise of books on Alexander.

Perhaps Alexander films too are also autobiographic and coming soon to a theatre near you is a new Alexander movie by Baz Luhrmann, that master of overstatement. You can read very soon the book of the Oliver Stone film: not Arrian or Plutarch, but Robin Lane Fox’s autobiographic The Making of Alexander the Great. Plainly the Alexander Romance is living and mutating into new life forms.

Douglas Kelly