Who was the real Alexander the Great?

Oliver Stone’s Alexander should now be out in theaters (I can’t be sure, since I am in Mexico at the moment and blogging in batches), so I’ll post another outtake from Robin Lane Fox’s historical biography Alexander the Great. This passage, I believe, is a good summary of who Alexander was as a man:

“Alexander was not merely a fan of toughness, resolution and no fear. A murderous fighter, he had wide interests outside war, his hunting, reading, his patronage of music and drama and his lifelong friendship with Greek artists, actors, and architects; he minded about his food and took a daily interest in his meals, appreciating quails from Egypt or apples from western orchards; from the naphtha wells of Kirkuk to the Indian ‘people of Dionysus’ he showed the curiosity of a born explorer. He had an intelligent concern for agriculture and irrigation which he had learnt from his father; from Philip, too, came his constant favor for new cities and their law and formal design. He was famously generous and he loved to reward the same show of spirit which he asked of himself; he enjoyed the friendship of Iranian nobles and he had a courteous way, if he chose, with women. Just as the eastern experience of later crusaders first brought the idea of courtly love to the women’s quarters of Europe, so Alexander’s view of the East may have brought this courtesy home to him. It is extraordinary how Persian courtiers learnt to admire him, but the double sympathy with the lives of Greece and Persia was perhaps Alexander’s most unusual characteristic. Equally he was impatient and often conceited; the same officers who worshipped him must often have found him impossible, and the murder of Cleitus was an atrocious reminder of how petulance could become blind rage. Though he drank as he lived, sparing nothing, his mind was not slurred by excessive indulgence; he was not a man to be crossed or to be told what he could not do, and he always had firm views on exactly what he wanted.

“With a brusque manner went discipline, speed and shrewd political sense. He seldom gave a second chance, for they usually let him down; he had a bold grasp of affairs, whether in his insistence that his expedition was the Greeks’ reverse of Persian sacrilege, though most Greeks opposed it, or in his brilliant realization that the ruling class of the Empire should draw on Iranians and Macedonians together, while the court and army should stand open to any subject who could serve it. He was generous, and he timed his generosity to suit his purpose; he know better than to wait and be certain that conspirators were guilty. As a grand strategist, he took risks because he had to, but he always attempted to cover himself, whether by ‘defeating’ the Persian fleet on dry land or terrorizing the Swat highlands above his main road to the Indus: his delay till Darius could do pitched battle at Gaugamela was splendidly aggressive and his plan to open the sea route from India to the Red Sea was proof of what wider insights into economic realities to which his Alexandria in Egypt still bears witness. The same boldness encouraged the fatal march through Makran; he had tactical sense, whether on the Hydaspes or in the politics of Babylon and Egypt, but self-confidence could override it and luck would not always see self-confidence through. Here, it is very relevant that rational profit was no more the cause of his constant search for conquest than most ofther wars in history. Through Zeus Ammon, Alexander believed he was specially favored through heaven; through Homer, he had chosen the ideal of a hero, and for Homer’s heroes there could be no turning back from the demands of honor. Each ideal, the divine and the heroic, pitched his life too high to last; each was the ideal of a romantic.”