With Oliver Stone's Alexander (click for trailer) lurking on the filmic horizon, this interview from Archaeology magazine with the film's chief historian Robin Lane Fox (pictured above with star Colin Farrel) - who teaches Greek and Latin literature, Greek, Roman and early Islamic history at Oxford, AND who appears in the film "on horseback in the front ten of every major cavalry charge by Alexander's cavalrymen" - is both timely and fascinating:

We know a lot about Alexander--thanks to Plutarch, Arrian, Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and other ancient sources--but there are enduring mysteries about him. Why did he set out to conquer Persia, but then just keep going?

Alexander inherited the idea of an invasion of the Persian Empire from his father Philip whose advance-force was already out in Asia in 336 B.C. Philip's campaign had the slogan of "freeing the Greeks" in Asia and "punishing the Persians" for their past sacrileges during their own invasion (a century and a half earlier) of Greece. No doubt, Philip wanted glory and plunder. Alexander took over the ambition, but for him, "Asia" meant even more than the existing Persian Empire as far as north-west India. He himself meant to conquer all of it, out to the Outer Ocean, the eastern edge of the world. He had no idea of Burma or China or the "Far East." Perhaps his tutor Aristotle's ignorant lessons in geography had made the world seem mistakenly small to him. But Alexander also wished to excel as the supreme hero, probably in rivalry with his great father's glory....

What did he die of? Poison, cirrhosis, typhoid, and, most recently, West Nile have been suggested. Do you have a favorite among these?

...There was no epidemic among other troops or officers, but I incline to malaria, caught (admittedly, only by him) in recent trips down the rivers beyond Babylon. Perhaps his seven wounds (the last, nearly three years before) compounded the problem. The truth is that we do not know, though we do know about the slander and accusations which his successors then circulated.

How can what we do know of Alexander's extraordinary career be distilled into a screenplay that runs perhaps two hours without reducing events and characters to mere sketches, assuming that they aren't "cut" entirely?

In only two-and-a-half hours, Oliver knew he had to leave out many major events in Alexander's restless career. But cleverly, he used Ptolemy, reminiscing and as "voice-over," who could hint at things the film could not show. And he designed the script as a drama, hung round Alexander's turbulent youth and his present actions, with Ptolemy speaking for the future. These "parallel stories" are not flashbacks: they are a dramatic, closely woven web, of Oliver's design, whose aim is a powerful drama. Of course, some events had to be brought forward in time or place and merged with similar ones, so as to be all shown on one (expansive!) location. Oliver knew all these changes, and why the film had made them. He was not making a documentary. He was making an epic drama, but the drama is unusually rooted in history. It has scope, though not the total story. And the major characters have a real dramatic power. These characters are all historical people and broadly they play in their main historical roles--as father, mother, tutor, wife, eunuch, general, and so forth....

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