“Alexander the Great: the Making of a God” premiered on Netflix globally on January 31, 2024. It is executively produced by Lucy Beek (“China Megatomb Revealed”, “Stephen Hawking’s “The Search for a New Earth”…) for Tailfeather Productions, and Nick Catliff (“Rebuilding The World Trade Centre”,” America Revealed”) with Tony Mitchell (The Bible, AD, Primeval, Supervolcano) as show-runner.
It is an attempt to represent on screen the life of Alexander, the mythical young Macedonian, who rose from the status of a banished prince to that of an emperor that ruled over a large swath of land from Greece, to Asia Minor, to Egypt, Persia and Central Asia. The story unfolds as a radical transformation from the life of a political and learned young figure to that of a Demi-god convinced of his “divine” mission as an absolute ruler of the “civilized world”. It is a more or less praiseworthy attempt, fairly marred by quite a few mishaps as we will see later.
The docuseries not only alternates drama with scholarly commentary but brings in archeological work carried out by the Greek archaeologist Calliope Limneos-Papakosta who has spent a great deal of time looking for the tomb of Alexander the Great in the Shallalat Gardens in Alexandria, Egypt, the city built by named after the great conqueror of Antiquity. It is debatable whether the archeological excavation fit well within the narrative fabric of the series, but it was a nice “plus”, nothing more.
The historians’ explanations, however, are professional, scholarly and clear; I liked the mix of historical references and historians’ opinions, especially when evidence is lacking. The assumptions are presented as theories, reinforced by historical and cultural contextual explanations.
The world of Alexander the Great was a continuous flux, stretching from Macedon all the way to Central Asia and south towards Memphis, and the Siwa Oasis in the Egyptian desert. It was a cultural ecosystem with its own figures, heroes, and agents, wherein deities play an important role and wherein the centers of civilization and culture vacillate between a centuries-old pharaonic Egypt, a vibrant hyper-civilized Persian culture centered around Babylon, and an emergent Hellenistic hub with Homer and Aristotle looming large over what was then dubbed (by the Persians) as “Brabarian” regions like Macedon.
The narrative did only little service to the inextricable continuity between Athens, Memphis, and Babylon. It shows a voyage wherein Alexander (Buck Braithwaite) is mesmerized by an “enchanting” Orient (at a moment when the “orient” as a notion did not exist; the “Orient” as an idea was created in Post-Renaissance Western literature and culture as Edward Said had shown) to such a point that he went “native” despite the protests of Ptolemy ( Will Stevens) (the same Ptolemy who will later be crowned as Pharaoh as pointed out by one of the historians and who is different from the famous Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer by the same name), his lover Hephaestus (Dino Kelly) and General Parmenion (Jardan Malkovitch).
It is as if there were a true self of Alexander (the Macedonian/Greek, pure, brutish but curious and royal) and a new-found self-remade Alexander, more or less blemished (according to his companions) by the metaphysical order of Egypt and the magic of Persia, and therefore affected by the reverie of wanting to become a God. A rational Aristotelian being has been transformed into an irrational semi-deity contemplating lunar eclipse and reading omens out of it, in perfect parallel to Darius III (Miko Hamada), the Emperor of Persia.
The plot of the series is jumpy, making it difficult to appreciate the growth and transformation that took place in Alexander’s personality, which made him accept being a pharaoh and later a Persian emperor. The transformation should be deep and profound but the narration only scathingly paid lip service to it, leaving the spectator at loss when and how the Macedonian prince became convinced that he was divine.
That Alexander believed he was a demi-God is neither warranted by the events nor by his actions as commanding general and person. The events showed him as a man in search of his destiny but rarely as a God. His mother’s suggestion early in the plot (in Macedon) that he was the son of Zeus introduced the theme but how Zeus became Ra later in Egypt was argued by the historians, but it remained an implausible transformation, starkly unsettled by the dichotomy of the West and the East.
In fact, despite his tyranny and bloodthirstiness, Alexander came out as this curious, open and knowledge-thirsty young man, but without the intellectual arrogance of the deified kings of antiquity. The divine belief of ancient kings made them less interested in human knowledge because they have reached the sum-mum of understanding. Alexander came out in the series as this enlightened tyrant in search of wisdom but far from being a god. Historically he believed he was divine, but the series did not manage to present the belief on screen in a convincing manner.
The dichotomy West (Macedon/Greece) versus the East (Egypt & Persia) is orientalist and at best a historicist projection of modern-day eurocentrism on fourth century BC reality. The blue-eyed Greeks or Macedonians, reinforced by “Alex”, “Heph” & “Ptol” short names, are at odds with the dark-haired and tanned complexion of all the peoples of that world, all the way from Greece to Asia Minor, to Egypt and Persia and their less than casual companionship habits.
The making of the East (as opposed to the West) is a post-Renaissance construct as most historians have shown. Even the ideas of “Rome” and “Greece” as precursors of Western civilization were discursive constructs built around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those notions are at odds with the realities of the Middles Ages, despite the crusades, let alone those of Antiquity.
The series are a fairly good contribution to the debate around Alexander the Great, but they did not manage to cast away the cloak of modern Eurocentricity in favor of a real immersion in to the cultural realties of Aegean, Asia Minor and Middle Eastern cultures of the time.
