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COPYRIGHT 2004 Smithsonian Institution
Taking measured steps around a lush garden terrace in ancient Egypt, Anthony Hopkins as the Macedonian general Ptolemy dictates his memoirs of helping Alexander the Great conquer the world. While he strolls beneath the palm trees of the ancient library in Alexandria--in reality, a sprawling movie set at Shepperton Studios outside London--the aged ruler of Egypt delivers a bombshell. "We killed him," Ptolemy says.
Literally? Or metaphorically? With Oliver Stone writing and directing, you never know for sure, even though the notion that Alexander was poisoned by his generals is "as dead as doornails," says Robin Lane Fox, a British biographer of Alexander who worked as a consultant on the movie. Stone, after all, defended the multiple-gunmen conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination in his 1991 movie, JFK.
In the library scene, Ptolemy, portrayed by Hopkins as a world-weary old soldier, says that if Alexander's men didn't literally poison his body, their refusal to follow him deeper into India surely poisoned his spirit. "I never believed in his dream," he says. "The dreamers exhaust us."
True enough, no conqueror ever dreamed so exhaustively as Alexander the Great. In the fourth century b.c., the Macedonian warrior-king attacked the Persian Empire, the most powerful realm in the world, with almost 50,000 soldiers--then ranged across three continents for more than a decade, subduing tens of millions of people. By the time Alexander died in June 323 b.c., six weeks shy of his 33rd birthday, his empire stretched from the Balkans to the Himalayas--an unprecedented kingdom that spanned what is now Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Despite his imperialist accomplishments, Alexander has always seemed a melancholy figure, possessed by what the ancient Greeks called pothos, a passionate yearning. Once, when court philosopher Anaxarchus described the infinite number of worlds in the universe to him, Alexander broke down crying. "There are so many worlds," he lamented, "and I have not yet conquered even one."
It was this pothos, as much as his military genius, that would make him a romantic hero--to the 17th-century English poet John Dryden, to Sigmund Freud, to world leaders from Julius Caesar and Napoleon to Dwight David Eisenhower. Others, such as St. Augustine and Dante, reviled him as a murdering, plundering bandit. Frank Holt, an Alexander authority at the University of Houston, estimates that more than 2,000 books and articles have been written about him in the past 40 years.
Yet the truth about Alexander remains elusive. For one thing, as Cambridge University's Paul Cartledge (author of Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past) points out, none of his actual words was recorded verbatim. Although there were several written eyewitness accounts of Alexander's campaigns, they survive only as fragments written down centuries later by sympathetic interpreters. Other writers suppressed or distorted events to make him look heroic or demonic, depending on their agendas.
Historians' verdicts vary. Some view Alexander as a charismatic, visionary leader intent on constructing a fusion of East and West, while others condemn him as a cruel and unstable megalomaniac, an ancient Stalin or Hitler who cared less about unifying mankind than consolidating control over as much territory as he could grab. A third camp credits Alexander with bringing Western notions of civilization to the East, using methods that seem brutal by today's standards but were acceptable in their time. Perhaps historians are divided because the man himself was divided--swinging wildly from blind wrath to acts of selfless generosity.
Historical novelists like Mary Renault and Valerio Manfredi have eagerly mined the Alexander legend, but few filmmakers have tackled the subject. Director Robert Rossen's 1956 Alexander the Great, with Richard Burton, was a heavy-handed dud. Since...
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