A few words of praise for Oliver Stone’s vision of Alexander

Oliver Stone received loads of criticism for his Alexander movie, revisions, and comments as if he had it all wrong. Well, nobody from Alexander’s lifetime is still alive to contest what’s right or not. 

As said in my earlier blog post about Stone’s book Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander, it is so much easier to point out the shortcomings than to consider the author’s considerable merit. The critics seem to forget that Alexander’s life was far too complex, too active, too magnanimous, and too genial to be told in a movie of three hours for a public largely unacquainted with history or Alexander the Great. 

At the end of his book, Oliver Stone added a highly interesting chapter “Afterward”, an excellent explanation and justification for his vision of Alexander. I can only admire his stamina.  I saved this text from some link back in 2006 and had a fresh look at it today. It is striking to read how, nearly twenty years later, Stone’s approach to Alexander is still so close to the truth! 

His plea for humankind to understand Alexander is worthy of Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator. Here is an excerpt worth reading:

The response is in what Alexander did, and not his motives, which I suspect were something like most of ours: highly ambivalent, at times glorious, at times wretched. I sometimes feel professional historians, generally apart from the human give and take of the marketplace, expect too much from their leaders -- requiring them to act from abstract principles in a world harsh with chaos, greed and infighting. We can certainly say in Alexander’s defense that he kept the expedition marching eastward for 7 more years after Babylon, with a greatness of vision that could motivate a 120,000-man army. By leading from the front and sharing the burdens of his men, he showed himself above the comfort lines of materialism, and as a known foe of official corruption, he set high standards by punishing those found guilty of stealing, raping, plundering (including his school friend Eumenes). From all accounts written of Alexander, we see time and again, his great passion, pain, and self-torture in incidents such as the murder of Cleitus, the burning of Persepolis, the mutiny in India, the kissing of Bagoas in front of his men, and the bestowing of official acceptance on Asian men and womenfolk. There is no ancient ruler, outside of legend, that I have ever heard commit such potentially self-incriminating actions. This is, of course, one of the reasons his name continues to endure – who was ever remotely like him? ‘In the doing, always in the doing’, Alexander. 

Conquest is also a form of evolution. If Alexander had a smaller vision, he would’ve retreated long before to Babylon and consolidated his empire. He would’ve brought his mother, his sister and his entourage to the Persian Court. He would’ve made a stronger, more patient effort to combine Macedonian and Persian custom. This unification of cultures would’ve been the lifetime challenge for any emperor, and would’ve certainly changed the course of history. Why did he not? 

I see Alexander more as an explorer, like many others of such a nature, not quite knowing what’s going to come up on the horizon, yet boldly reaching for the new electrical charge of change. He stayed in motion until the end, and never returned to his Rome, London, Paris, Berlin, or Mongolia, as other conquerors have. He comes across in many ways as a man who was making it up as he went along -- from Babylon through Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and back to Babylon -- where in the end, he remained unsatisfied, dreaming of his expedition to the West. I would call him not an imperialist as present fashion would have it, but rather a ‘proto-man’, an enlightened monarch naturally in search of one land, one world -- the unity, so to speak, of the womb. Given that Alexander might’ve had a longer lifetime to develop this experiment, his empire might’ve yielded perhaps six or seven centers -- such as Babylon, Alexandria, Athens, Carthage, Rome, South Spain, a world with nerve centers that supposes, to a surprising degree, the global world centers we have today – but with one world government, centered on enlightened monarchy, or, barring that, some form of governing body. 

In unconsciously pursuing this ‘one world’ concept, under the guise of a personal quest, the Alexander of the drama we created would have to be a man who believed he was the right force to bring the world into a greater sense of unification and prosperity, that he was a step in the evolutionary process. And given the cataclysms possible, I do think Alexander ruled extraordinarily well for 12 years over men, both noble and bestial, in a social fabric that not only maintained itself, but greatly expanded in terms of culture, scientific discovery, and economic progress. It’s so easy to dismiss this great effort, I think too easy, to declare it broken after 12 years of rule. But can we say it really broke apart? Even if dissolved in four parts, the basic communal energies remained in place, and his creation culminated shortly, within 150 years, in the burgeoning Roman Empire.

I cannot agree more!

The unique Temple of Apollo in Bassae

Many years ago, I drove around the Peloponnese exploring antique sites other than the well-known remains of Corinth and Olympia. 

One of my roads led me to the Temple of Bassae, which, according to my travel guide, was the only temple of Antiquity to combine Doric, Ionian, and Corinthian styles. Relying on the signposts I drove up a narrow winding road the width of my car through a landscape that seemed untouched by time. It was a most beautiful scenery dotted with circular threshing floors used to separate the grain from the straw and husks by beating it manually. These ‘floors’ also served as dancing on festive occasions. Time had clearly come to a standstill. 

As in the middle of nowhere, the grey columns of a temple appeared with behind it a normal asphalt road… I had found Bassae the hard way but certainly the most beautiful one.

[Picture from Albion Gould]

Just the other day, I came across the picture of an odd-looking temple in Figaleia dressed in ghostly white hailed as the “second Parthenon”. Where? What? It turned out to be the Temple of Apollo Epicurius in Bassae, now heavily studded. It brought me right back to that exciting drive so long ago. What happened here? 

Well, I praise myself lucky to have been there before the series of drastic restorations started. The first works were carried out between 1902 and 1908 but did not affect the appearance of the temple. Later interventions changed the glorious view I had enjoyed forever. In 1985, an anti-seismic scaffold was installed followed by a lightning protection. Since 1987 the entire temple has been wrapped in a tent to protect the monument against extreme weather conditions. This is said to be a temporary measure but after almost forty years we may wonder if this cover will ever be removed. There is not much worth seeing right now, is there? 

The Temple of Apollo Epicurius (the Helper) of 38 x 14.5 meters was erected between 420-400 BC by the citizens of Figaleia to thank the god for delivering them from the plague of 429-427 BC. It was designed by Ictinus, who also was the architect of the Parthenon in Athens. 

The Temple in Bassae built with local grey limestone is remarkable for several reasons. Unlike the general east-west orientation of the Greek temple, this one is set north-south because of the terrain or perhaps to comply with some religious traditions of the people of Figaleia. Access to the temple would be through a door on the east side, another anomaly. And, this temple of Apollo is the only known example from antiquity to combine all three orders of ancient Greece: Doric for the outside columns, Ionian for the inside, and three Corinthian columns at the southern end. What struck me also during my visit were the Ionic columns inside the cella that were attached to the wall. Two Corinthian columns were attached at a 45-degree angle to the wall and the third one stood between them. I was deeply impressed by these exceptional architectural details. 

The temple was abandoned around the 4^th-5^th century AD. As it stood in a relatively remote area outside the city of Figaleia, it was not plundered. Eventually, the roof collapsed and severely damaged the interior of the temple. The outer colonnade remained standing and that is what I witnessed during my visit. 

The excavations were first started in 1811 by a group of European archaeologists led by Charles Cockerell after receiving permission from the local Pasha. The agreement was that the booty would be split between the Pasha and the archaeologists. After a few weeks, 23 metopes were recovered. Twelve of them depicted the Battle between Greeks and Amazons and the remaining eleven told the mythical Battle between Lapiths and Centaurs. 

When the Pasha saw the reliefs, he was very disappointed as he had expected gold and other precious artifacts. For him, the find had no value and he refused to take his share. After giving him the sum of £400, the archaeologists took the metopes to be auctioned in Zakynthos. The highest bidder was the British Museum, which paid £19,000 for the lot. That is how the entire length of the frieze (31 meters) has been fitted in a room of its own at the BM. 

During a later visit to the Museum of the Louvre in Paris, I came across two sitting Maenads from Bassae. They were clearly resting after their frenzy dances in a state of divine madness and ecstasy which was illustrated by their sweaty wet chiton clinging to their body! Only a highly skilled sculptor could render this state of mind in such a palpable way. 

There must have been a statue of Apollo inside since the sanctuary was dedicated to this god, but I have not heard about its presence. 

It sounds strange to say that I did not miss seeing any metopes or statues in or around the temple. At the time, this isolated sanctuary impressed me by its location, as the roughness of its grey limestone blended in so well with the landscape that the picture seemed complete. 

The white tent covering the temple is said to protect the building against the region's extreme weather conditions. I do not understand this reasoning for after all Apollo protected the temple against the elements for the past 2,500 years.