Artists
have a long history glorifying empire and lionizing conquerors.
Virgil’s Aeneid, for all its stylistic brilliance and good
storytelling, is also a justification of the Roman Imperium with
Augustus as its legitimate ruler. The painter Jacques Louis David
might have immortalized the liberating spirit of the French Revolution,
but he also romanticized the aggressive militarism of Napoleon
with his vainglorious and preposterous painting of the Corsican
adventurer crossing the Alps. Kipling wrote poems exalting the
British imperial mission and invited the Americans to do their
share, and so on.
Late
in life, the famed director Oliver Stone seems to have fallen
for this same temptation. In an interview with Charlie Rose last
November 25th (2004), Stone praised Alexander for freeing
slaves, overthrowing tyrants, building cities, spreading commerce
and culture, and attempting to blend Hellenic (Western) and Asian
civilizations. He even suggested that Bush’s delusional ambition
to democratize and pacify the Middle East is of a similar nature
and might succeed where Alexander failed. Stone did not support
the Iraqi war, or Bush’s wilder plans, but in glorifying Alexander
he furnishes a precedent and thus gives it unwitting moral and
artistic support.
His
admiration for Alexander is unsettling and even seems a betrayal.
His Born
on the Fourth of July (1989) is one of the most powerful
antiwar films ever made, and few films puncture the myth of American
martial valor – disciplined and righteous – more than
Platoon
(1986). Stone’s betrayal would be more tragic if his talent and
artistry had not made a film whose scenes and character development
undermine his vision of Alexander as conquering hero. What I saw
depicted on screen was a crazed idealist and megalomaniac, who
betrayed his own men by "going Persian," who reacted
violently to dissent, and whose dream of a universal empire could
not possibly succeed. We actually see Alexander’s fine army come
to a wall in the jungles of India, where they are tormented by
mosquitoes and cobras, weakened by stifling humidity and monsoon
rains, poisoned by bad water, and assaulted by enraged war elephants.
The
film closes as it opens with an aged but keen Ptolemy reciting
his memoirs from his palace overlooking the harbor of Alexandria.
When he comes to the king’s death, he makes a stunning admission:
he and the other generals allowed Alexander to be poisoned because
they had finally had enough of the endless campaigns and their
leader’s limitless ambition – if allowed to go on, Alexander
and his "ideas" would have killed them all. Although
he immediately recants and orders the words scratched off the
parchment, it is clear they represent his true thoughts and feelings
despite his following peroration in praise of Alexander’s glorious
accomplishments and dreams.
Stone’s
Alexander is not being well-received by the critics. Their
dismissals and disparagements are having an effect: of my friends,
none have seen it, but all report that they have heard it stinks.
I have told them all to see it anyway – damn the critics;
and that goes double for the historically minded of the libertarian
Right. Alexander is not a great film, but it is very, very
good. My biggest complaint was the smarmy soundtrack: it is really
lousy; and there are editing issues. Yet, overall, I know of no
film that captures the spirit and feel of the classical world
more than this one (perhaps too much so when it comes to the sexual
predilections of the Greeks). Stone takes the polytheistic faith
and ancestral piety of the Greeks seriously and has them thinking
and speaking like ancients, not moderns. And, unlike some of his
other films (Nixon,
JFK)
he stays true to the history. He also wisely refrains from turning
the story into a saturnalia of violence, in the form of endless
battle sequences, like Gibson’s Braveheart
and Spielberg’s Saving
Private Ryan, both of which are burdened with gratuitous
slaughter and are frankly masochistic. Stone chose to depict only
two of Alexander’s great battles: Gaugamela in Mesopotamia and
Hydaspes in India. They are stunningly rendered and both evoke
the terror of war in a way that few films ever manage to do. In
addition, the recreations of ancient Alexandria and Babylon are
gorgeous; and, by the way, so is the dark beauty Roxane, Alexander’s
Asiatic wife.
Imperialists
have always dressed up their conquests as contributions to civilization
and boons to mankind. The Romans claimed to be spreading peace
and the rule of law, the British boasted of Christianity and commerce,
the French had their culture and language, and now the Americans
claim to be extirpating evil, liberating women, and implanting
righteous democracy. For such worthy ends, all means are justified,
all atrocities are covered, and profit and power justly accrue
to the strong. If the Americans are sanctimonious, brutal, self-interested,
and hypocritical, so were those who went before. Simone Weil said
of the Romans that "they never committed any acts of cruelty,
never granted any favours, without boasting in each case of their
generosity and clemency." Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Weil
wrote her masterpiece, L’Enracinement (Rootedness), or
The
Need for Roots, in early 1943 while living in London,
in exile from her native France, then under German occupation.
She rebuked her countrymen for helping to prepare the way for
Hitler’s aggressions by their veneration for Napoleon and, before
him, Caesar, the ancient conqueror of their land. Her argument
was simply this – if one says yes to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon,
one must say yes to Hitler; if not, take your stand with the hypocrites.
"If one admires the Roman Empire, why be angry with Germany
which is trying to reconstitute it on a vaster scale by the use
of almost identical methods?" Why indeed?
It
all depends on which side one is on. It was easy for Virgil, lounging
in his comfortable villa, to rhapsodize that the Romans had civilized
Gaul, but it was harder for the forty thousand Celtic inhabitants
of Bourges who were butchered by the Roman infantry for daring
to resist the peace and good order offered them (their beautiful
city was then burned to emphasize the lesson).
So
it was with Alexander, and now is with his modern multicultural
apologists. He razed the ancient and venerable city of Thebes
and sold its people into slavery (20,000 of them according to
Plutarch), for a strong ruler cannot tolerate rebellion, as Ptolemy
explains at the beginning of Stone’s film. And of course he had
to raze Gaza, which resisted him, for how else could he found
his beautiful Alexandrias, linked by trade and culture, if some
cities on the route said no. As for recalcitrant Tyre, which he
had to besiege: what better instruction could there be than the
crucifixion of the city’s two thousand surviving warriors, and
the selling into slavery of its thirteen thousand women and children?
In
Persia, Alexander carried out his doctrine of multi-generational
guilt. After an all-night drinking party, he torched the royal
palace of Persepolis, even though it was now his palace,
at least by right of conquest. And there were limits to his multiculturalism:
according to tradition, he tried to extirpate the state religion
of Zoroastrianism by desecrating its shrines, destroying its temples,
burning its scriptures, and murdering its priests – so much
for Alexandrian religious toleration.
Then
there is the sad story of the Branchidae, fellow Greeks, whom
Alexander put to the sword because of a crime committed six generations
before. While marching deep into Central Asia, Alexander and his
army came upon a town of exiled Greeks who lived north of the
river Oxus. The people, who were overjoyed to greet the Macedonians,
revealed that their ancestors were of the priestly family of Didyma
and had fled long ago from the Aegean city of Miletus. Their crime
was to have collaborated with the Persian king Darius during his
invasion of Greece one hundred and fifty years before. The next
day, Alexander surrounded the town with his troops, and the people,
bearing olive branches, went out in supplication. Alexander ordered
his men to kill them all, which they did, raze the town, tear
down its walls, and dig up its orchards and sacred groves –
nothing would be left, as a lesson. None of that got into
the film.
Of
Alexander’s other war crimes and atrocities Stone depicts only
the murder of Clitus, one of the Macedonian king’s most trusted
and competent generals, whom Alexander, in a drunken rage, ran
through with a spear for daring to talk back to him. There is
nothing of Callisthenes, the expedition historian and nephew of
Aristotle. According to the historian Curtius, he was known among
the Greeks as "the champion of public freedom," for
he spoke out when others were afraid, and dared to oppose Alexander's
more grandiose ideas, including his self-deification. After he
had conquered all, Alexander thought it was time that his men
acknowledged his divinity by prostrating themselves before him,
as the Persians were already doing. Callisthenes thought this
rather un-Greek (demeaning and hubristic), and quoted Alexander’s
favorite book – Homer’s Iliad – against him:
"A better man than you by far was Patroclus, but still death
did not spare him." This was too much for Alexander, who
already resented his outspokenness and independence of mind; so
he had the Athenian intellectual implicated in an assassination
plot (he was innocent), found him guilty, and had him tortured
to death. Few spoke out after that.
As
they blunder and butcher their way through the heart of Alexander’s
eastern empire, the Americans have a lot to learn (having already
forgotten the lessons of Vietnam), especially of the insanity
and corruption of absolute power.
Here
is a short list of recommended readings and viewings:
