The current pointless tussle over the bisexuality of Alexander of Macedon is only the latest and cheapest tribute paid to our fascination with him. Recent studies have also raised the question of whether he was a hopeless alcoholic (or perhaps an almost sacrificial votary of a cult devoted to Dionysus, the god of wine) and of whether he was just another bloodthirsty conqueror.But note this first: This man really did exist, and these events really did occur. Our sources may be fragmentary and inconsistent and contradictory, but they involve us in disputes about real people and events. For the next four weeks, you won’t be able to go into a supermarket without hearing pseudo-devotional music concerning an episode 2,000 years ago that may well never have taken place. Meanwhile, Jews will be celebrating Hanukkah, which commemorates the victory of the Orthodox over those Jews who had succumbed to “Hellenism” in Alexander’s time. (“Hellenised Jew” is still a taunt hurled by Orthodox Israelis against the secular.)Alexander is only a “myth” because his achievements were legendary in his own lifetime and for the secondary and myth-generating reason that we do not know where he is buried. But this has not prevented archaeologists and historians from closing in. It took a very long time for Manolis Andronikos to locate the tombs of the Macedonian royal house, including that of King Philip. But a British classicist named Nicholas Hammond, who had worked with the Greek resistance during World War II, consulted all the ancient accounts he could find and pointed to Vergina, in Greek Macedonia. Dig there, he said. And Andronikos found it. The unmistakable Greekness of the trove is part of the reason that the Greek government is so upset at President Bush’s recent decision to recognise former Yugoslav “Macedonia” under its assumed name.Alexander’s tutor was Aristotle (a fact that supplies endless fascination to those who study the relationship between philosophers and monarchs, from Machiavelli to Leo Strauss). And Aristotle, perhaps sharing in the continuing rage and shame at the Persian desecration of the Acropolis in 480 B.C., urged his pupil to treat the peoples of the Persian Empire as coldly as he would plants or animals. The available evidence is that Alexander did not take this advice.Excerpted from an article by Christopher Hitchens at www.slate.com
