Alexander Redux

The Virtues of War

A Novel of Alexander the Great

by Steven Pressfield

Doubleday, 368 pp., $24.95

ALEXANDER THE GREAT WAS A beacon of Western culture shining in the darkened East–except that he was really nothing more than a modern peacenik, presiding over international lovefests. The right analogy for him is clearly a Scottish nobleman in ancient Greek armor–except that he was obviously an Aryan übermensch striding through a world of lesser races. He was, of course, a titanic womanizer–except that he was a flaming homosexual, ruling a Macedonia that was basically a forerunner of Fire Island. The best way to understand him is to examine the intelligent way he practiced realpolitik–unless you prefer to see him as the largest megalomaniac who ever lived, a barely human figure for whom the world existed merely to be conquered.

In short, Alexander the Great was . . . well, take your pick. In the past year, we’ve had everything from Peter G. Tsouras’s military profile, Alexander: Invincible King of Macedonia, to the inevitable claim that you, too, can be happy and successful–a world conqueror!–in The Wisdom of Alexander the Great: Enduring Leadership Lessons From the Man Who Created an Empire by Lance B. Kurke, Ph.D.

If you prefer your history drier than Laura Foreman’s picture-filled biography Alexander: The Conqueror: The Epic Story of the Warrior King, then you might try the volume Blackwell’s has collected, Alexander the Great: Historical Sources in Translation. The standard work of the current crop is Paul Cartledge’s Alexander the Great, but Steven Pressfield’s fiction has its fans, and his latest is The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great. And then, leaving no stone unturned, there’s the cinematic adventure, Alexander, directed by Oliver Stone.

Curiously, this multiplication of Alexanders is not an entirely willful misreading of a verifiable historical figure by modern revisionist historians. Take a look at ancient discussions of the man–Arrian, Diodorous, Plutarch, Quintus Curtius–and you’ll see that no one has ever agreed with anyone else on what Alexander was about.

In Alexander the Great, Paul Cartledge, the Cambridge classical historian and acclaimed author of The Spartans, gives us a conservative and reliable picture of the man who made Macedonia famous. This volume both avoids the pitfalls of the idiosyncratic and offers a sane and unified vision of Alexander, artfully and instructively told. Constructed from lectures delivered at Cambridge over the past twenty-five years, the learned treatment of Alexander is made the more enjoyable by the conversational echoes it retains from its years as an oral presentation.

Beginning with the Greco-Macedonian world Alexander inherited–and considering along the way Alexander’s modern reception by would-be emperors, scholars, and novelists alike–Cartledge’s largely chronological treatment pauses as necessary to gather into separate chapters the thematic strings. He concludes with a helpful appendix that arranges the maddening array of ancient sources on Alexander and walks the reader through the method by which he established the most likely account of what actually happened. Cartledge’s Alexander is a fine book that will restore your confidence in historians’ ability to present skillful, balanced research in a readable and engaging way.

CARTLEDGE ARGUES that Alexander’s motives revolve primarily around hunting, the Macedonian noble’s favorite pastime, which boys–including Alexander–were taught to love from an early age. Cartledge’s use of the hunt as a controlling metaphor in his narrative elaborates a theme in one of our extant ancient sources, Arrian’s Anabasis. For Arrian, Alexander was driven by pothos–longing desire–for conquest, emulation, and competition.

Indeed, perhaps the only sphere of Alexander’s life free from this longing was that other battlefield, the one where Cupid’s arrows fly. The contemporary observer would have discovered in the conquistador’s bedroom a copy of the Iliad annotated by his tutor Aristotle (a document classicists would kill to recover). No one should underestimate the sway Homer held over Alexander’s imagination. Dressed at the Battle of the Granicus in what was purportedly Achilles’ armor, Alexander figured himself as the Homeric hero newly incarnated, with his faithful sidekick, Hephaestion, as his latter-day Patrocles.

From very early on, Achilles and Patrocles were considered a homosexual couple, and one cannot but agree with Cartledge’s conclusion that Alexander and Hephaestion did, at some time in their lives, have a homosexual relationship–although the ancient sources never precisely say this. They didn’t need to. In the complex of contemporary Greco-Macedonian sexual practices, homosexuality was not thought to militate against eventual heterosexual marriage and procreation. It would have been thought queer had Alexander not had a male lover.

With such thoughts in mind, we may turn to Steven Pressfield, an author of note with a bestselling historical novel to his credit: Gates of Fire, on the Spartans and the Battle of Thermopylae. Pressfield’s The Virtues of War is much less successful. Historical novelists must be given some range to present historical figures, but readers familiar with the ancient sources and with Alexander as a historical figure will find Pressfield’s Macedonian king unconvincing.

Mary Renault pressed a political agenda in her trio of Alexander novels–Fire from Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972), and Funeral Games (1981)–by portraying the young conqueror as an oversexed homosexual. Pressfield instead sets his Alexander–a man of blood and iron, mind you–in the a Platonic mode, eschewing all that is flesh and matter, ascending ethereal heights to the realm of the immaterial Idea: “And let me put this plain, for those of a depraved cast of mind: The love of young men is bound up with dreams and shared secrets and the aspiration not only for glory but for that purity of virtue that their hearts perceive as soiled and degraded among the generation senior to themselves but that they, the youth, shall reinspirit and carry through….It has its physical element, but among those of noble mind, this is far superseded by the philosophical. Like Theseus and Pirithous, Heracles and Iolaus, like Achilles and Patrocles, young men wish to capture brides for each other; they dream not of being each other’s men, but each other’s best men.” Or to put it another way, Don’t ask, don’t tell.

Rather than Hephaestion, we do better to consider Alexander’s presence in bed with Aristotle’s notes on Homer. For Pressfield, the poet of war triumphs over the philosopher. As his Alexander avers, “As boys we were taught, in our tutor Aristotle’s phrase, that happiness consisted in ‘the active exercise of one’s faculties in the conformity with virtue.’ But virtue in war is written in the enemy’s blood.” Later, before the battle of Gaugamela, Pressfield’s Alexander grandiosely declares, “A million men stand in arms against us. I will rout them by my will alone.” Pressfield’s Alexander emerges less as a student of Aristotelian moderation than as a self-styled poster-child for Nietzsche’s triumph of the will.

THE MOST ENDURING IMAGE that will emerge from this spate of Alexandriana will no doubt be that played by a peroxided Colin Farrell in the film by Oliver Stone. Though nearly three-and-a-half hours long, Alexander is forced to compress and suppress a great deal. Stone focuses on Alexander’s brilliant moments (the major set-piece battles at Gaugamela and the Hydaspes), using flashbacks to fill in details such as Alexander’s mother’s complicity in his father’s death.

As historical adviser for the film, Stone employed the services of the eminent classicist Robin Lane Fox, whose 1973 biography Alexander the Great served as the basis for the screenplay. Lane Fox is no garden-variety academic: In addition to being Alexander’s biographer, and the author of several readable works of solid scholarship, he is also the Financial Times‘s longtime gardening correspondent and a horseback rider. For his services, Lane Fox sought no monetary remuneration, but instead, as he told a reporter, “a place on horseback in the front ten of every major cavalry charge by Alexander’s cavalrymen to be filmed by Oliver on location.” Lane Fox’s transformation from an academic into an on-set consultant and Macedonian cavalryman has been made into a BBC documentary first aired in May, Charging for Alexander.

Stone’s storyline is set up by a voice-over in the character of Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s marshals and long-time friends, who later established a family dynasty in Egypt that survived until the death of his best-known descendant, Cleopatra. In many ways, Alexander is a capstone to much of the director’s previous work. Anthony Hopkins, who was Stone’s Nixon, is the wise elder statesman Ptolemy here, while Alexander’s father, Philip II, is played by Val Kilmer, who had been Jim Morrison in Stone’s The Doors. The death of Alexander’s father, King Philip, may have been the work of a single assassin working alone–or a conspiracy unearthed, implicating those in the highest reaches of power (A familiar Stone motif, no?). Many of the battle scenes in Alexander are filmed in that what-the-hell-is-going-on style that Stone pioneered in Platoon.

Perhaps never since the imperial aspirations of Napoleon supernovaed at Waterloo in 1815 has the figure of Alexander the Great seemed so relevant in the modern West. The United States finds itself embroiled in the internal affairs of the Middle East, toppling tyrannies and thugdoms, importing Western notions of governance to places where to many we are the infidel–and Alexander is often deployed as either an example or a counterexample, a model for what we should do or a model for what we shouldn’t.

SUCH COMPARISONS may justifiably be made, even if they are not straightforward. We continuously seek for motives, ambitions, reasons, causes, outcomes, rises and declines, things behind images, facts behind spin. Like the region Alexander conquered, continuously rewritten by the wash of history since his time, every new interpretation of Alexander is another layer of text on an already well-worn palimpsest. Even before he died, the man was lost behind his image. A beacon of Western culture, a shrewd practitioner of practical politics, the greatest megalomaniac the world has ever seen? Take your pick.

Christopher M. McDonough and Jon S. Bruss teach classical languages at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.