Victor Davis Hanson: (subscription to National Review required)
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Alexander helped to kill more Greeks at the victory of Chaeronea, the siege of Thebes, the campaigns in Ionia, and the battles of Granicus and Issus than the Persians killed in a century and a half of EastñWest conflict. The razing of Thebes — the dramatic setting of much of Athenian tragedy, home to Pythagoreans and Pindar — is ignored. The brutal siege of Tyre was considered a military masterpiece; it and the storming of Gaza go unnoticed. How or why Persepolis was torched is never really investigated, but has framed centuries of debate. There is a good-enough description of the battle of Gaugamela, but Granicus and Issus are unmentioned. Some sort of Vietnam-like elephant fight in the bush apparently substitutes for the set-piece against Porus at the Hydaspes. In any case, it resembles more Stone's mythodrama of Platoon than anything out of Arrian.
Alexander's ego killed more of his men in a needless trek through the Gedrosian Desert than Darius III ever did on the battlefield. That disaster and the dirty fighting in Bactria merit almost no screen time. Also omitted is Alexander's introduction to the Western world of decimation, crucifixion, and other phenomena.
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Alexander's Macedonians were both more and less tolerant of homosexuality as we would describe it than the modern world, focusing not on the desire per se for male sexual companionship, but rather on the method of its manifestation. In some sense, the Macedonian evening communal tent was not unlike the savage world of the modern prison. In both, constant male intimacy created a strange classification of masculinity, in which active roles involving penetration were seen as quasi-normal sexual expression, a sort of surrogate intercourse when women are not to be found. Those weaker, prettier, or younger who are "used" are seen as little more than "women," and alone suffer the abuse of surrendering their male identity, whether by inclination or under coercion.
Stone seems to grasp none of this complexity. But had he really believed that Alexander's sex life should not be separate from his remarkable career, then it would have been portrayed as incidental rather than as essential to his persona, and in no way much different from that of the men he led. In contrast, if Stone, quite without historical support, really believed that Alexander's desire was both unusual for the time and at the heart of his ambiguous legacy as both founder and destroyer of innumerable cities, then he should have explored the asceticism, rather than the indulgence, of Alexander. The ancients believed not that Alexander was obsessed with sex or that he was at all kinky in his tastes, but that his carnal desires were oddly sublimated to an array of other concerns, from mysticism and religion to Asian politics and fashionable foreign cults.
Indeed, it's less likely that sex was at the root of Alexander's relationships with his mother Olympias and his companion Hephaistion, and his various liaisons with Eastern princesses, than that Alexander was — unlike his lusty Macedonian compatriots — rather asexual. He may have liked young men around in the fashion of an aesthete Epaminondas, Lord Kitchener, or General Douglas Haig, and might even have often enjoyed male outlets in the manner of Frederick the Great or Kemal Ataturk, but Alexander the Great was more likely a bore in the bedroom. He was surely not in the class of a Caesar, Napoleon, or Wellington — whose sexual appetites are still irrelevant to understanding their military legacies.
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