Alexander the Great as Portrayed by Plutarch

Alexander the Great as Portrayed by Plutarch and Oliver Stone

"My intention is not to write histories, but lives. Sometimes small incidents, rather than glorious exploits, give us the best evidence of character. So, as portrait painters are more exact in doing the face (where the character is revealed) than the rest of the body, I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks of the souls of men. By these, rather than the historical events they participated in, I try to portray their lives. I leave the task of a more complete historical chronicle to others."

Plutarch began the life of Alexander with this disclaimer. Writing in an age when manuscripts were copied painstakingly by hand on relatively expensive parchment or vellum, writers had to strive to be brief and succinct. Plutarch's life of Alexander runs to a little over thirty pages in the Dryden translation.

In our age when one tries to portray a life in the medium of film, the chief constraint is time. Action and dialog may appear to run swiftly, but is always slower than the speed of reading. The director must decide what to include based on, 1) what he thinks is important to the story he is trying to tell and, 2) the entertainment value, which often boils down to a decision of how much action vs. how many lines of dialog to include.

The writer of history is concerned with elegance of style, the moviemaker with evoking the appearance of past times and visual beauty. For the sake of economy of time, a moviemaker must choose what to include and what to leave out. Separate incidents and characters are often combined into composites. The historian has the luxury of giving more than one version of historical incidents when the facts are in dispute, the moviemaker must generally use only one. (With some exceptions, such as the technique used in the classic Rashomon and its imitators.)

In the latest attempt to portray the life of Alexander the Great, Oliver Stone had three hours to portray on film what Plutarch recorded on thirty pages, and often falls short. Whole sections of the campaigns of Alexander were cut out, the subjection of the rebellious Greek states and the destruction of Thebes. The campaign in India was reduced to one battle towards the end of the movie.

Nonetheless, Oliver Stone did a pretty good job of following the career of Alexander in broad outline as told by Plutarch. He tells the story in the form of a narrative by Ptolemy in his old age, dictating the story of Alexander to a scribe (presumably intended to be one of the now lost sources of Plutarch). This allows action to be compressed and for the scene to shift months or years at a time.