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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
He's looked on very differently in the East than he is in the West.
If you take today a Zoroastrian or a Parsi or even just an Iranian, and you talk about Alexander the Great, they'll tend to have a very negative view of him as a destroyer. He burned down the palace of the old Persian monarchs and Zoroastrians believe that he destroyed in the process a number of their sacred books.
Do you think the Alexander obsession could exacerbate tensions between East and West?
I imagine that the documentaries will be balanced and won't give uniform praise of Alexander. On the other hand, it's difficult for a movie, like Stone's, not to in some way heroize him. I have seen the synopsis and it's not entirely positive. Aspects of Alexander's personality are criticized. There is even the suggestion that he was murdered by his own courtiers because they thought he was getting too big for his boots, that he was taking them into places they didn't want to go, either ideologically or physically. And that's actually based on some historical evidence, though most scholars think that he died of a fever, either typhus or malaria.
Is it true that Alexander thought of himself as a god?
It's a big issue and unresolved. Many certainly think that he did think of himself as divine and did want to be worshipped generally. He certainly was worshipped, there's no question about that, both by Greeks and by Egyptians and others. But did he order people to worship him as a god? That's where the uncertainty lies.
Are there any lessons from Alexander that come to mind when you consider the war in Iraq?
Well, you have to immediately distinguish any modern leader who fights from well behind the front lines using the most modern technology and doesn't actually see face-to-face combat. Alexander was wounded many, many times, once nearly fatally, and he always led his armies from the front. He was always right at the forefront in a pitched battle or a siege, so you can't compare your commander in chief to him.
On the other hand, I think the general lesson is that if you're going to go into a country such as Iraq, there's a very different culture, and bringing your ideas, you've got a notion that you are superior in some way culturally, or can somehow teach other people to be as good as you are. You have to think of the consequences. Not just whether or not you can beat the enemy, and in this case overthrow a regime, but what happens then? What is the likely consequence?
What I think has happened in Iraq is that you got rid of Saddam and the Baath party and all his friends and relatives who held power. What's left is what was there before Saddam -- imams and tribal warlords. We're not dealing with parliamentary democracy. You cannot imagine that a military solution is going to bring about a political aim. Alexander, on the other hand, I think, had a much better idea. Perhaps the most significant thing he did was that very early on, after beating the Persians, he appointed a very senior Persian who had previously been on the other side as one of his governors. He made him governor of Babylon, which was one of the most important provinces in the old Persian Empire, now Alexander's empire. I think that was a key move.
What about Alexander's bisexuality, which is something that these movies are going to be able to deal with in a way that, say, the Richard Burton version couldn't?
I've read a bit of Stone's script, and that's not flinched from. At the time, it was entirely normal that a young boy would have a sexual relationship with a 25-year-old man, and then when he became 25, he would have a relationship with a teenage boy, so I think "bisexual" is not quite right because that implies that you have a notion as to what it means to be hetero- or homosexual. For them, there is sex, there is sexual activity with either members of your own sex or members of the opposite sex, but what matters is age more than anything else and social status. And Alexander was odd in this respect, not in having sex with another male, but in having sex with a eunuch.
We're not given particular graphic descriptions of this, but the evidence, I think, is pretty clear that he was in an affectionate, emotional relationship with a Persian eunuch. When he met him, the boy was maybe in his teens still. He had previously been a beloved of the great king of Persia. Alexander took over not only the crown, but the king's favorite eunuch.
Now, that I think is quite shocking in Greek and Macedonian terms, because they thought eunuchs were effeminate and that if you're a man, you shouldn't in any way be like a woman. They had a very sharp notion of what was masculine and what was feminine, and the notion that Alexander would have a probably sexual, certainly emotionally affectionate relationship with a non-Greek eunuch was quite shocking.
On the other hand, what's not in itself shocking, but is interesting is that he married three times, and each wife was Oriental. He never married a Greek or a Macedonian woman, which is, I think, quite remarkable.
