Not content with slaughtering roughly 1 per cent of the world’s population, Alexander the Great almost destroyed Colin Farrell’s acting career.
The Dubliner seriously considered retirement after a disastrous critical response to his performance in Alexander (2004), not helped by director Oliver Stone insisting he used an Irish accent. Few were impressed by Stone’s explanation that Hibernian tones would symbolise the Macedonian monarch’s earthiness compared to more urbane ancient Greeks.
As Edmund Richardson points out in his visceral, entertaining if slightly melodramatic biography, however, extreme interpretations of this subject are nothing new. “There will never be a definitive Alexander,” the Professor of Classics at Durham University acknowledges, noting how various writers have depicted him as “a philosopher king”, “a genocidal psychopath”, “a charismatic superman”, “a sharp-witted pragmatist” or “a megalomaniac schoolboy”.
With so many predecessors, Richardson deserves credit for finding a distinctive approach. His panoramic womb-to-tomb narrative focuses on the intense physical nature of Alexander’s all-conquering journey through Central Asia and North Africa. You can almost smell the burning ruins of Thebes, see the stampeding elephants of India’s Punjab and hear the screams of this military genius’s enemies as they are ripped limb from limb.
We also get chapter and verse on how Alexander’s empire building stitched Hindu, Babylonian, Persian and other cultures together, bolstering the author’s grandiose claim that he “reshaped reality more profoundly than anyone else in history”.
Drawing on recent archaeological discoveries and newly deciphered sources in a dozen languages, Richardson’s command of this turbulent saga is hugely impressive. He includes the standard disclaimer that every colourful story here was written at least 300 years after Alexander’s premature death from drinking contaminated water. It doesn’t affect the gusto with which he relates such well-worn vignettes as Alexander taming a wild horse, slicing his sword through the fiendish Gordian knot and being ordered by street philosopher Diogenes to “get out of my sun.”
While psychoanalysing such a remote figure feels rather speculative, Richardson’s diagnosis of a paranoid, hot-tempered, highly sexed autocrat with no real political vision beyond collecting territories certainly sounds worryingly familiar.
“Perhaps you are wondering why the world needs another book about Alexander?” the Greek historian Arrian wrote around 145 AD. Thousands have been added to the shelf since then, but this richly detailed and full-blooded portrait must surely be among the most enjoyable.
- Andrew Lynch is a freelance reviewer
