I recently rewatched Oliver Stone’s Alexander – the number of times I have now seen this colossal film is deeply embarrassing to me. Let’s be quite clear from the start: it is not a good film in any traditional sense. Divorced from context, it is in fact quite a bad one. It is horrifically overacted, full of bizarre creative choices, and exists in four different cuts which each solve some problems whilst creating entirely new ones. Scenes are too long, then too short; plotlines appear and vanish; Colin Farrell is an unconvincing Alexander who spends most of his time ranting about destiny. None of this matters to me. I spent much of my childhood immersed in the Alexander romance, starting from the Valerio Massimo Manfredi trilogy, and Stone hits almost every note I would have wanted him to hit.

And it is a romance! Gaugamela and the Hydaspes are the two best depictions of ancient warfare put on screen – vast and violent and dusty and, crucially, in formation. The sets and costumes are incredible, landscapes suitably enormous, and the Persians treated with a degree of respect that shames the usual racist drivel served by films like 300. The score is likewise fantastic, with every march across a hill treated as though humanity is witnessing the birth of a new god (which might not be entirely inaccurate).¹ It is clear that Stone had a serious desire to portray the Alexander story properly, and we get all the right bits of historical meat: the mystery of Philip’s assassination, the entry into Babylon, the crossing of the Hindu Kush, the mutiny at the Hyphasis, and the rapid deterioration of Alexander’s personal relationships. The film is so very sincere. Stone seems to genuinely believe in the version of Alexander he portrays, and the grand dream he espouses. It is hard to imagine Hollywood producing anything quite like it today. There is no Whedon-style banter, no embarrassment or apology for the sheer scale, and no hint of cynicism.

Perhaps there should be. I grew up with the Great Man version of Alexander, but then I learned how to do history. I developed adult thoughts like politics and ideology and spite – and that feeling changed. Alexander stopped looking like a superhuman genius and began to resemble more a mediocre man elevated by circumstance. For a coarse modern comparison, think of Trump: success produces its own mythology, and for every Alexander there are dozens of equivalent figures who have been derided or forgotten simply because they didn’t get as lucky, or exist at such an appropriate historical moment. These men win because history aligns around them, and the victory itself is treated by later generations as proof that they must have been uniquely brilliant.

Stone’s Alexander is no different. He is a visionary who wants to unite East and West, breaking down the division between Greek and barbarian through a modern universalist multiculturalism that is simply not historically supported. His violence is acknowledged, but contained within the structure of a tragedy – the means through which he attempts to construct his new order. He wants too much and goes too far; he is cruel because he is damaged, consumed by ego because his ability justifies it, and misunderstood because his peers are too backwards to grasp his grand vision. The film does not suggest that Alexander was wrong, but merely that the world was not ready for him.

This is pure modern mythmaking. At the same time, any interpretation must be. Contemporary accounts are long since lost, and what survived of Alexander’s life is a regurgitated mess of official history, self-serving memoirs, hostile gossip, and literary invention filtered through Greek and Roman writers who lived centuries later. Regardless, I struggle to believe in Alexander the Great, multicultural dreamer. The man I see looks rather different, and thanks to the uncertainty of history I cannot be told that I am wrong.

Alexander may have been a talented military commander, but even that requires qualification. He inherited Philip’s military machine after the invasion of Asia had already begun, surrounded by the older generals who had constructed it and devised the campaign. Wily old Parmenion played an essential role in the early victories, and later campaigns became longer and less decisive after Alexander had him assassinated. The forces he defeated at Issus and Gaugamela (and elsewhere) were not the vast barbarian hordes favoured by ancient writers, but likely not much bigger than the better-drilled and better-equipped Macedonian army. Alexander’s invasion of India was halted barely within the borders of the modern state, long before reaching the Gangetic plain and the heart of Nanda power. Through the historical haze it is even possible to argue that he suffered a defeat against the Scythians on the banks of the Jaxartes; certainly the aftermath of the battle does not support the narrative that it was an ingenious victory.

But even if we accept that Alexander was the military genius traditional history sees him as – what then? Is this a virtue? Is there some great romance in a cruel, vain, paranoid little monster with no apparent skill except in the accomplishment of violence? He killed and he killed and he killed, burning cities and exterminating populations with wilful abandon. Slaves flowed westwards, and few parts of the Greek known world were spared the attentions of the Macedonian juggernaut. Where administration existed, it seems only to have had the purpose of feeding his next campaign. His empire collapsed into civil war immediately upon his death because he was not a man capable of creating a credible succession plan or lasting bureaucratic structures that could function as a state. If we allow another coarse modern comparison, it must be with Nazi Germany: a war machine organised around continual expansion and violence that had no ability to stop and govern the territory it had consumed. Much like Nazi Germany, Alexander’s empire was destined to end quickly – had he lived another decade or two, it likely would have collapsed within his lifetime and history would view him quite differently.

And yet there is a romance here. Alexander’s empire was doomed to fail, but the Hellenistic world that emerged from the wreckage gives us one of ancient history’s most complex and fascinating stories.

It begins, appropriately, with Alexander’s corpse. Ptolemy stole the body on its journey back to Macedonia and carried it instead to Memphis and later Alexandria-the-most-famous, where the corpse became a useful source of legitimacy for the new dynasty. The living members of Alexander’s family were less fortunate; Olympias, his mother, was killed when Cassander seized Macedonia, whilst Roxana and the young Alexander IV were quietly murdered soon afterwards. Alexander’s half-brother, Philip III Arrhidaeus, was proclaimed king in Babylon but was used only as a pawn by warring generals before being disposed of several years later – by Olympias herself. Heracles, a bastard son of Alexander, fared little better. The men and women who loudly proclaimed their loyalty to Alexander ensured that none of his blood survived to rule.

The resulting wars of the Diadochi (Successors) are as close as the ancient world gets to a world war. Alexander’s generals spent forty years stealing provinces from each other in an ever-shifting web of alliance and counter-alliance, marrying and murdering each other’s relatives in the process. One-eyed Antigonus came the closest to reassembling the Asian empire before being killed in the phalanx at the remarkable age of 80. Seleucus lost Babylon, returned with a tiny army, built the largest of the Diadochi states, and was himself murdered as he prepared to claim Macedonia. Demetrius Poliorcetes lurched between triumph and disaster with such theatrical excess as to be comical, though history now remembers him best for Helepolis, the colossal siege engine built for the failed siege of Rhodes that was melted down to fund the Colossus.

Things did, eventually, settle down. The surviving Diadochi managed to do what Alexander never could: stop conquering long enough to govern. The Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Antigonid kingdoms were violent and unstable, but they developed systems of taxation and bureaucracy that allowed them to survive the deaths of individual kings; it was Rome that eventually brought this era to an end several centuries later. These states borrowed extensively from the societies they conquered. Macedonian nobilities were wrapped in the traditions of Achaemenid Persia and Pharaonic Egypt. This was not the harmonious multicultural paradise imagined by Stone. The new kingdoms were monarchies established through conquest, sustained by the labour of people who had little influence over their new ruling elites. Cosmopolitanism is not the same thing as tolerance.

Nonetheless, the scale is intoxicating. Greek became a language of government and urban prestige across most of Western and Central Asia, extending down into parts of the Indian subcontinent, but it did not sweep away what already existed. Babylonian priests continued to record astronomical observations, temples functioned in the same way they had for long centuries before, and new cities were built in cultural landscapes fundamentally shaped by ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Iranian peoples. Alexandria was a centre of scholarship and commerce defined by the relationship between its Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish populations, and this template was followed in other Alexandrias and Seleucias and Greek colonies across the continent. Hellenistic culture was not Greece radiating outwards into an empty map, but was rather created through the continual (though unequal) interaction of settlers, soldiers, and subject populations.

On the eastern edge of this new world, history becomes beautiful. Ai-Khanoum contained a theatre, gymnasium, and Greek palace complex thousands of miles from the Mediterranean, yet it clearly also belongs to Iranian and Central Asian traditions. The Greco-Bactrian kings broke from Seleucid rule and developed an independent Hellenistic world beyond the Hindu Kush. Their Indo-Greek successors moved into India, where Greek philosophers interacted with Buddhist monks to create an entirely new tradition. In Gandhara, Buddhas and bodhisattvas were depicted through forms drawing upon traditions from across vast tracts of the ancient world. Drapery resembling the Greek himation wrapped Buddhist bodies, and Corinthian columns decorated monasteries in what is now Afghanistan. This fusion flourished long after Greek political rule had disappeared: these were thus not isolated colonists, but new societies shaped by environments and peoples that even Alexander had scarcely imagined.

Perhaps it is wrong to romanticise this. I am not here to claim that Alexander’s conquest was good, or the Hellenistic world anything other than violent and exploitative. The point is different – that history is formed of stories, of trade and cultural contact and the unlikely meetings of peoples. This was not a world created by Alexander’s genius or the conquering Diadochi, though they certainly enabled it. Instead, this was a world shaped by generations of artists, merchants, soldiers, settlers, and the innumerable local communities living with the consequences of that time. The romance is in its vastness and its strangeness, and it belongs to the people who inhabited it.

This is why I can despise Alexander and still love Alexander. Stone is wrong about the man, but he still captures something real about the world that followed him. It has a sense of scale and wonder and the breaking down of ancient boundaries. The film chooses to attribute this all to the grand modern dream of one troubled genius. The truth is far more interesting. Alexander did not produce the Hellenistic world. Generations of people built it from the wreckage he left behind. The romance begins precisely where the historical Alexander ends.