Historians with our distaste for unprovoked war and killing now cast Alexander as increasingly murderous and exceptionally savage. Their older contemporaries remember Hitler or Stalin. My generation, and later, have also grown up in a post-colonial world: explicitly, at least, Americans never had an empire, anyway. In antiquity, Alexander came to be credited with taming or civilizing barbarian peoples, not least by his many Alexandrias. He was believed to have had plans for an inclusive, "harmonious" kingdom where Macedonians and Iranians would share as a ruling class....

One tricky area in a film adaptation of Alexander's life is his relationship with Hephaestion. How does the film deal with this? There would be the danger of downplaying it, but wouldn't there also be a danger of making a Macedonian male-male relationship into a modern one?

Alexander did not have a one-way homosexual orientation, in the prevailing modern use of the term. He had sexual relations with males (including a eunuch) but also with a Persian mistress, his first wife Roxane (mother of his child) and two more Persian wives, too. In youth, his great friend was Hephaestion, and surely the sexual element (frequent between young males, or and older and younger male, in Greek city-states) developed already then. Oliver, Colin, and Jared Leto [who portrays Hephaestion] rightly concluded that sex was not the main element in this love, Alexander's greatest friendship in his lifetime. But it happened, as authors in antiquity assumed: "Patroclus" to Alexander's role as a new Achilles. Alexander was not behaving in this way in a "gay," one-way relationship or counter-culture, nor was he exceptional. The film aims to show a wider love, from boyhood, between the two, and I find it very touching. Correctly, it also shows a sexual element, this time of pure physical desire, between Alexander and the eunuch Bagoas--again, as direct and indirect evidence supports. But no viewer could also miss the sexual charge of Roxane, the woman whom Alexander marries. By avoiding a one-way male-male love-life, the film captures both the "homoerotic" flashes and a boyhood relationship--but also makes it an element, not the element, in Alexander's nature and his personal appeal.

....As a historian, what do you hope the audience will take away after seeing Alexander?

I hope audiences go away enthralled by the scope of Alexander's aims and drawn into it all by the drama Oliver has imposed. Film, with today's special effects, can show vast crowds, armies and cities, giving a stunning sense of scale which archaeology cannot. That scale comes out brilliantly, especially at Gaugamela--but so does the interrelation of great names--Ptolemy, Aristotle, Roxane, Philip--with Alexander, as in his history. I think anyone fascinated by the drama would love to know more about the historical record (and its limits) of the years and people on whom Oliver's "web" has been imposed. If only, too, they would also learn Greek--and share, like Alexander, in the Homeric epics, the world's greatest poems, which inspired Alexander too. But their governments will have to restore them to our school curricula, instead of subjects which have never drawn such world-wide audiences or caught such a director's fascination and taken his cast and team to such lengths, with such respect. This particular historian likes the movie, anyway.