Alexander and Darius

Victor Davis Hanson reviews Alexander
the Great and finds it bears no resemblance to history.

The film goes on for nearly three hours, but we hear nothing of what either
supporters or detractors of Alexander, both ancient and modern, have agreed
were the central issues of his life. Did he really believe in a unity of
mankind, and were his mass mixed marriages, Persian dress, and kowtowing
cynical, sincere, or delusions of megalomania? We see nothing of the siege of
Tyre, Gaza, much less Thebes or even the burning of Persepolis. Other than the
talking head Ptolemy, none of his generals have much of a character. There is
nothing really in detail about the page purging other than a single reference;
Stone, I would have thought, could have had a field day with Alexander�s
introduction of both crucifixion and decimation. ...

So since Stone omitted the controversial and key issues of Alexander�s
career, what do we get instead for at least over two thirds of the movie?
Mostly sit-com drama, with gay and bi- subplots, in various bedrooms and
banquet halls. Olympias was something out of a teen-aged vampire movie, not
the sophisticated and conniving royal we read about in the sources. It is the
old Dallas or Falcon Crest glossy pulp in Macedonian drag.

A sense of the wealth of information that is omitted -- and which VDH knows
is omitted -- can be glimpsed from the incident of mass mixed marriages.
Some management theorists, going a little deeper than Oliver Stone, have
regarded the incident as the first recorded instance of a merger
in history. Others have characterized it as the first stumbling steps towards
modern multiculturalism.

In quick succession he took Egypt, Babylonia, and then, over the course of
two years, the heart of the Achaemenid Empire--Susa, Ecbatana, and Persepolis--the
last of which he burned. Alexander married Roxana (Roshanak), the daughter of
the most powerful of the Bactrian chiefs (Oxyartes, who revolted in
present-day Tadzhikistan), and in 324 commanded his officers and 10,000 of his
soldiers to marry Iranian women. The mass wedding, held at Susa, was a model
of Alexander's desire to consummate the union of the Greek and Iranian
peoples.

Of course, not every shotgun wedding ends happily. Some historians
have argued the experiment was a failure. "The result was mass desertion
and mutiny, one of many that occurred during his campaign." The siege of
Tyre, which the erudite VDH refers to in a single phrase, was an instance in
which an army defeated a maritime power, always an interesting situation. It was
based on the appreciation that the Persian navy was operationally constrained by
the need to obtain chandlering supplies at Tyre. Therefore he reduced Tyre,
thereby defeating the Persian navy via a land campaign. Of Gaugamela
I will say nothing, other than remark Alexander's oblique advance to the Persian
left created a dynamic battlefield which destroyed Darius' set-piece. The
outnumbered Alexander may not have known precisely where a gap in Darius' line
would open except that he knew it would -- and bet his life on it.

But it is Darius I sometimes feel for. There is evidence
he was a decent man, something in the mold of a Jimmy Carter, and he had no
chance against the dynamic and ruthless Alexander.

The Roman author Quintus Curtius Rufus - who wrote his history of Alexander
around 40 AD - tells us that Darius was of "mild and placid
disposition". He seems to have been an optimist. Before his army set out
to face the Macedonians at Issus, he had a terrible dream in which he saw his
enemy Alexander in the same clothes as he himself wore before his accession.
His seers offered conflicting interpretations. Darius chose to go for the most
tempting explanation: that Alexander would be brought before him defeated, in
the clothes of a commoner. What is highly informative about this passage is
that Darius apparently was dressed very modestly when he became king.

Curtius continues by saying that Darius was "a man of justice and
clemency". He was loyal to those who supported him. He felt responsible
for the well-being of the troops under his command, even if they hailed from
alien nations and practised customs which were culpable to his Persian
courtiers. He appears to have been flexible up to the point of self-denial.
Before Gaugamela he made three peace offerings to Alexander. In the first one
he addresses Alexander as "Alexander" and himself as "His
Majesty". In the third one he is virtually down on hands and knees. Prior
to the final battle Darius in prayer expresses his hopes that after him Persia
will be ruled by his "merciful victor".

Darius' reward was to die like a pursued
animal. While attempting to organize a resistance against Alexander, Darius
was betrayed by one his subordinates, Bessus, and slain. Bessus had calculated
on winning the gratitude of Alexander; but the demi-god understood above all how
treason, now that he was king, had to be rewarded. Bessus was cruelly mutilated
at Alexander's command and executed.

Hollywood may have calculated that none of this was important; that the sole
point of interest of a population weaned on the tabloids was the earth-shaking
question of whether or not Alexander was gay. Jeanne
Reames-Zimmerman convincingly argues the poverty of the question. In her
monograph, Reames-Zimmerman argues that the concept of gayness, as it is
presently understood, did not exist in the ancient world. From her discussion it
is possible to say that Alexander might have been gay in the sense that convicts
in a penitentiary are gay -- an exercise in power by one man over another -- and
if that analogy is inexact so is any other. The world of 320 BC is as distant
from us today as the 19th century, the last point in time when men intuitively
understood the ancient world. It was then then that the explorer and
anthropologist Richard Burton could write these words in his Book
of the Sword and expect them to be widely understood:

The History of the Sword is the history of humanity ... Primitive man ...
was doomed by the very conditions of his being and his media to a life of
warfare; a course of offence to obtain his food, and of defence to retain his
life. ... Peace was never anything to them but a fitful interval of repose.
The golden age of the poets was a dream; a Videlou remarked 'Peace means death
for all barbarian races'

Osama has as often said and we have as often misunderstood: 'peace be unto
us'.