Bust of Alexander the Great, from Delos, now in the Louvre.
|
There are many flaws in Oliver Stone's movie Alexander
and there's no need to repeat what has been said so often before: the
endless speeches, the flat characters, or the remarkable portrayal of
Alexander's homosexuality, which appears to have been either too much
or not enough for the reviewers.
Still, I have the impression that the most
disturbing
aspect of the movie has remained unmentioned: Stone and his historical
adviser, Robin Lane Fox from Oxford University, offer an extremely
one-sided picture of the war between Macedonia
and Persia. It is based on western sources only, as if the Near Eastern
studies of the last decades have offered nothing new. Now I will
immediately admit that it is easy to exaggerate the importance of a
discovery, but I think that in the last quarter of a century, we have
indeed obtained something valuable. The cuneiform tablets from Babylonia,
which are published slowly, offer contemporary, first-hand evidence.
Ancient historians are currently witnessing a breakthrough comparable
to the discovery of the scrolls of the Dead Sea. Stone and Lane Fox
seem to be unaware of
it.
Or have they deliberately chosen to ignore it? It
can be argued that the narrator of the movie is a European, Ptolemy,
who cannot have been aware of Babylonian information. Not only is this
untrue (many texts were immediately translated into Greek), but the
movie also contains images of events at which Ptolemy cannot have been
present. We are, therefore, not witnessing Ptolemy's story, but a
historical reconstruction. Stone and Lane Fox have left no opportunity
unused to say that they were showing events as they really must have
been, so I think that we are justified to judge them by this standard.
What have the ignored Babylonian sources to offer?
There is some specific information about Alexander.
The Astronomical
Diaries (and the Chronicles
based on them) mention, for example, the course of the battle of Gaugamela,
the dethronement of the Persian king Darius III Codomannus,
the accession of Bessus,
an execution and a satrap
not recorded elsewhere, Alexander's building projects, his preparations
for a war against the Arabs,
the date of his death (11 June 323), and the price of food when his
army was in Babylon.
Even more important is that the cuneiform texts offer general
information. We now have a far better idea about Near Eastern society
than thirty years ago.
As a result, we can correct errors in the western
sources. For example, the entire account of the battle of Gaugamela
needs to be rewritten.
The lunar eclipse of 20 September 331 was the
worst of all possible omens and the soldiers of the Persian army knew
that their king was doomed. When Alexander attacked these demoralized
men, they almost immediately deserted their king. To exaggerate a bit:
"Gaugamela" was no battle at all, the Macedonians were butchering
refugees. The story by the Greek historian Arrian
of Nicomedia,
in which Darius is presented as a coward, is simply wrong. The great
king was deserted by his troops, not the other way round, as Stone and
Lane Fox would have it.
Or, to offer another illustration: Stone's Babylon
is
some sort of "Playboy Mansion" with a royal harem and belly dancers.
Since the days of good old Herodotus,
this is the usual way to represent the cultural capital of the Near
East, and in many western languages, the word "Babylon" has become
shorthand for sexual scandal. However, there is simply no evidence for
the prostitution mentioned by Herodotus and Curtius
Rufus,
or the royal harem with 365 concubines that Alexander is supposed to
have taken over from king Darius. There are tens of thousands of
cuneiform tablets (120,000 in the British Museum alone), and none
of them offers any support for the reconstruction of Babylon
that is offered by Stone and Lane Fox.
Sometimes, a Babylonian source helps us recognize
significant details in our Greek and Latin sources. One of the
unpleasant surprises that the Babylonians experienced was the
introduction of the rack. They had no word for it, so they used the
rather clumsy expression "ladder of interrogation". Alexander's
excessive use of torture is merely hinted at in the classical sources
but now appears to have been widely recognized as a distinguishing
aspect of his policy. It's not in the movie.
What is disturbing about Alexander
is that it
offers a western image of a decadent Near East, full of cowardly kings
and sensual women. No orientalist cliché is too grotesque.
If
Lane Fox had ignored thirty years of scholarship in his book on Pagans
and Christians,
his reputation as a serious scholar would have been damaged beyond
repair. If Stone had used similar stereotypes to describe Jews, native
Americans or Africans, he would have encountered a storm of
indignation. Unfortunately, there is no Iranian Anti-Defamation League.
|
|
