Vergina Sun wrote:athenas owl wrote:That made my morning in the humour department. Which, in my coffee deprived brain makes me long for a panel TV show, like the political ones on CNN (where they would yell at each other)... Lane Fox and Peter Green going at it over the table. "You sir, are an ignorant ass! and this is why..."
Oh yes. I would certainly watch a show with Alexander historians arguing like that.
Staying on topic now, I definitely agree that the vivid battle descriptions in the documentary would make Curtius proud. And the sideburns were the icing on the cake. What did you think of Colin Farrell's hair (which kept growing and growing...)in "Alexander"? Anything like the real Alexander?
Well I wasn't saying he was like Curtius like it was a good thing...though I don't discount everything Curtius says, just try to filter it through his specific era and reason for writing it.
The hair in the film (not starring Brad Pitt
), I took it symbolically, the further away he got from home, the more " alien" his appearance. By the time he got to India, with the stress of the campaigns, he looked pretty bad. I didn't overthink the hair, it didn't bother me. It was a movie.
As I have said before, I take the figures from the Alexander sarcohpagus for colouring. It's closer in age than any of the Roman copies (a few decades at the most and if it was Abdalonymous who commissioned it, or even Mazaeus, they knew him personally and would remember what he looked like).
Maybe some of the coins that were near comtemprary and the Elephant medallion with him on one side (actually from his lifetime). I do think the boy had a big conk..er nose though if that an ideal of beauty then perhaps even that was exaggerated?. And was darker haired than some want to believe. The "idealised images" emerged so quickly after his death, I think his original appearance is lost to us forever...unless he is found and a reconstruction is done on the skull ( Venice? bows to Taphoi). We might all be in for a big suprise.
Then again the possibility that the Stag Hunt Mosaic at Pella is a representation of Alexander, though the Lion Hunt With Craterus is assumed to Alexander, and here again there is a consistent image of him stocky and not so tall.
The Alexander Mosaic reminds me of a young Al Pacino...not that that is a bad thing.
Sorry for getting back to this so late, but I had read that Alexander only trusted his sculptor to be Lysippus, and so that is why I believe that it is probably the one he would have accepted if the Roman copy is even close to the original.
