Alexander's eight-year conquest of Asia was accomplished while he was in his twenties. Many of his generals, even some of his soldiers, were warriors of late middle age and older -- Philip's men. "Imagine the president of the United States being 23 years old and leading, at the front, an army of 60-year-olds. My God, it's extraordinary," said the historian.
Fox defends this joining of history and film, especially today, when modern techniques and budgets can serve as tools of time travel, to transport an audience to the blue gates of Babylon, to the shorn field of ancient dust clouds, to hear first, and then see, rising from the violent chaos, the scythed chariots of Darius's guard (Mad Max to the max, with their wicked blades spinning on axles like some vision of Hell).
A scene from Oliver Stone's "Alexander," which opens this week. Historian Robin Lane Fox's role was to bridge the gap between entertainment and scholarship.
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
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"Certainly," Fox says, "there is a gap between entertainment and scholarship. Both Oliver and I know this. They can profit when they come close together, but they are different enterprises. That's important."
But "I defy any historian to truly imagine what an army of more than 200,000 would look like on a hillside. Darius and the Persians facing Alexander and the Macedonians, with their attested strength of 47,000 coming at it. The scale of it. The nerve. The eye of the battle."
Astride his own stallion, riding bareback, no stirrups, in full battle costume and helmet, Fox rode at the front in the flanking cavalry charge at Gaugamela (filmed in Morocco).
"What immediately impresses is how your upper legs are exposed," Fox says, really getting into it. "Why didn't the Persians on the ground slice the legs off the horsemen? The Macedonians were not heavily armored. I was a sitting target, I thought. But I was not."
And the reason, Fox thinks, comes from the ancient Greek word lyssa, meaning battle fury, madness, similar to the Old Norse term berserkr.
"I know what it means now," Fox says. "Even with a rubber spear, I know what it means, and you don't come near a chap, even with bare legs, if he is possessed by lyssa, especially if he is a historian."
How do we know these things, these details of the weaponry, tactics, force strength of a battle that took place more than 2,000 years ago?
The life and times of Alexander were recorded in five principal histories, written by his contemporaries, men who often were eyewitnesses to the events. There was Callisthenes, a relative of Aristotle, official court historian (Alexander later had him imprisoned and perhaps tortured to death); the engineer Aristobulus; the admiral Nearchus; the flatterer Onesicritus; and, perhaps best of all, Ptolemy, a friend from boyhood, a general in his army, and later ruler of Egypt.
But there is the problem. None of these old texts survived. All the originals have been lost and all we have are other, later historians, writing 300 or 400 years after Alexander's death, quoting bits and pieces from the past in their own accounts. These histories were composed mostly by Romans, who had their own axes to grind.
"The Alexander scholarship is alive and very active around the world," Fox says. A more rigorous puzzle, but not unlike the fun people have with deciphering "The Da Vinci Code."
"There are scores of us, and there will always be," Fox says, "because so much depends on what view one takes of the interrelations of the sources, how you compare and balance their accounts. And I dare say we underestimate the extent to which ancient authors would invent, exaggerate, fill in the gaps." As the Greek historian Strabo (63 B.C.-A.D. 21) remarked, "All who wrote of Alexander preferred the marvelous to the true."
What is real and what is imagined in the Stone film? "Alexander has to speak dialogue, words that we have no evidence he spoke," Fox says. "Fiction has to be part of it. Oliver is not making a documentary, though he'd make a damn fine one. But I was happy to be part of it. It is a better film for having history as a springboard."
Stone hews to the known historical outlines -- for battles, Alexander's construction of 25 cities, the capture of Babylon, Alexander's drunken murder of his friend Cleitus, the plot of the pages (they sought to off Alexander) and the mutiny of his men in India.
All close enough. Stone also attempts to understand Alexander as the product of a headstrong mother and a wary, distant father. Is that a modern conceit? Or one as old as humanity?
As for the bisexuality, Fox says the historical accounts certainly support the love relationship between Hephaistion and Alexander. Homosexuality was an intricate part of the pre-Christian Greek world, well established, and sanctioned by state and cultural norms, especially the relationships between older men and teens. Where Alexander may have differed was that his affair with Hephaistion was lifelong and between men of roughly the same age.
Stone reportedly was asked by the studio and his producer to tone down some of the violence of battle and some of the man-man sexual innuendo.
"Oliver's imagination is that Alexander and Hephaistion were the greatest lovers, they adored each other, but sex was not the biggest part of it," Fox says. "And in the totality of the film, and this is not a film about sex, I hope that people will focus far more on Alexander's immense youth, ambition and his vast vision."
Pop quiz to follow.
