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Born in Jul 356 BC in Pella, near the Aegean coast in then Macedonia, Alexander was the only son of the ruthless King Philip II and the hot-tempered Olympias. Covington discusses the life and death of Alexander the Great and the story of his life as shown in the documentary film starring Colin Farrell as Alexander.

TAKING MEASURED STEPS around a lush garden terrace in ancient Egypt, Anthony Hopkins as the Macedonian general Ptolemy dictates his memoirs of helping Alexander the Great conquer the world. While he strolls beneath the palm trees of the ancient library in Alexandria-in reality, a sprawling movie set at Shepperton Studios outside London-the aged ruler of Egypt delivers a bombshell. "We killed him," Ptolemy says.

Literally? Or metaphorically? With Oliver Stone writing and directing, you never know for sure, even though the notion that Alexander was poisoned by his generals is "as dead as doornails," says Robin Lane Fox, a British biographer of Alexander who worked as a consultant on the movie. Stone, after all, defended the multiple-gunmen conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination in his 1991 movie, JFK.

In the library scene, Ptolemy, portrayed by Hopkins as a world-weary old soldier, says that if Alexander's men didn't literally poison his body, their refusal to follow him deeper into India surely poisoned his spirit. "I never believed in his dream," he says. "The dreamers exhaust us."

True enough, no conqueror ever dreamed so exhaustively as Alexander the Great. In the fourth century B.C., the Macedonian warrior-king attacked the Persian Empire, the most powerful realm in the world, with almost 50,000 soldiers - then ranged across three continents for more than a decade, subduing tens of millions of people. By the time Alexander died in June 323 B.C., six weeks shy of his 33rd birthday, his empire stretched from the Balkans to the Himalayas -an unprecedented kingdom that spanned what is now Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Despite his imperialist accomplishments, Alexander has always seemed a melancholy figure, possessed by what the ancient Greeks called pothos, a passionate yearning. Once, when court philosopher Anaxarchus described the infinite number of worlds in the universe to him, Alexander broke down crying. "There are so many worlds," he lamented, "and I have not yet conquered even one."

It was this pothos, as much as his military genius, that would make him a romantic hero-to the lyth-century English poet John Dryden, to Sigmund Freud, to world leaders from Julius Caesar and Napoleon to Dwight David Eisenhower. Others, such as St. Augustine and Dante, reviled him as a murdering, plundering bandit. Frank Holt, an Alexander authority at the University of Houston, estimates that more than 2,000 books and articles have been written about him in the past 40 years.

Yet the truth about Alexander remains elusive. For one thing, as Cambridge University's Paul Cartledge (author of Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past) points out, none of his actual words was recorded verbatim. Although there were several written eyewitness accounts of Alexander's campaigns, they survive only as fragments written down centuries later by sympathetic interpreters. Other writers suppressed or distorted events to make him look heroic or demonic, depending on their agendas.

Historians' verdicts vary Some view Alexander as a charismatic, visionary leader intent on constructing a fusion of East and West, while others condemn him as a cruel and unstable megalomaniac, an ancient Stalin or Hitler who cared less about unifying mankind than consolidating control over as much territory as he could grab. A third camp credits Alexander with bringing Western notions of civilization to the East, using methods that seem brutal by today's standards but were acceptable in their time. Perhaps historians are divided because the man himself was divided-swinging wildly from blind wrath to acts of selfless generosity

Historical novelists like Mary Renault and Valcrio Manfredi have eagerly mined the Alexander legend, but few film-makers have tackled the subject. Director Robert Rossen's 1956 Alexander the Great, with Richard Burton, was a heavy-handed dud. Since the success of Gladiator in 2000, however, "swords-and-sandals" epics-last in vogue with Ben-Hur in 1959 and Spartacus in 1960 - are back, and at least three Alexander films are in the works-by Baz Luhrmann (director of Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge), due out next year; by Ilya Salkind (producer of Superman); and by Stone, whose $150 million juggernaut with Colin Farrell in the title role is due to open across the country this month.

"Basically I wanted to do the film as an experiment," says Stone, "to see if Alexander's motivations hold up today "Taking a break from editing the movie at a studio west of Paris in June, the director sounded more like a star-struck fan than notorious Hollywood maverick. "He was the Sun God, the star of all time, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle rolled into one," Stone says. "Some historians put him down ... in a class with Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun, but they miss the point. No tyrant ever gave back so much. His life was not about money for himself, but about his growing curiosity, engaging and fulfilling his intellect, his consciousness."

There's substantial agreement on one issue: Alexander's military prowess. "He would've made mincemeat of any Roman who came over the hill," says biographer Lane Fox. "Julius Caesar would've gone straight back home as fast as his horse could carry him." And Napoleon? "Alexander would've wiped him out too. Napoleon only fought dodos."

Alexander personally spearheaded his attacks, suffering severe arrow, lance, sword and knife wounds. As Roman historian Arrian said of Alexander around A.D. 150, "The sheer pleasure of battle, as other pleasures are to other men, was irresistible." Once, when he found himself stranded without a ladder atop a fortress surrounding Multan in present-day Pakistan, he jumped straight down alone into the midst of the enemy, instead of leaping outside the walls to safety Managing to fend off his attackers until help arrived, he received a nearly fatal arrow wound that may have punctured his lung. When his doctor insisted that officers hold him down to keep him from squirming, Alexander waved them away, sitting stoically as the surgeon sliced the deeply embedded barb out of his chest. "As a warrior and strategist," Lane Fox says, "no one compares to Alexander."

BORN IN JULY 356 B.C. in Pella, near the Aegean coast in then Macedonia (now Greece), Alexander was the only son of the ruthless King Philip II and the hot-tempered Olympias. (After Philip died, she killed Philip's last wife, Eurydice, and Eurydice's baby daughter, Europa.) At the time of Alexander's birth and right up until Philip's assassination 20 years later, Alexander's father was preoccupied with consolidating the Macedonian Empire through diplomacy, political marriage, intrigue and war-particularly against the rebellious Greeks to the south. Although Macedonians spoke Greek and regarded themselves as Greek, the Athenians, Thebans and citizens of other Greek city-states dismissed them as culturally inferior hicks.

According to Peter Green, professor emeritus of classics at the University of Texas at Austin, Olympias spoiled her son outrageously; he idolized her in return. The love-hate relationship that Alexander had with his father, says Green, was "an ambivalent blend of genuine admiration and underlying competitiveness." From his father, Alexander is believed to have inherited courage, quickness of decision and intellectual perceptiveness. His mother, who may have tried to turn their son against his father, gave him a will stronger than Philip's, as well as fervent religiosity.

When the prince was a young boy, he eyed a black stallion, Bucephalas, that neither the king nor anyone else could control. As the horse stymied rider after rider, Alexander noticed that he reared at the sight of his own shadow. When Alexander's turn came, he calmly stroked the animal, turned his head into the sun so that he could not see his shadow and galloped off in triumph. "My boy, you must find a kingdom big enough for your ambitions," Philip declared. "Macedonia is too small for you." Alexander rode Bucephalas until the war horse died in 326 B.C. fighting elephant-mounted brigades in present-day Pakistan.

During his early teens, Alexander was taught by Aristotle, who inspired the prince's lifelong interest in biology, medicine and zoology. Ultimately, Alexander broke ranks with his tutor on an issue that was to become critical for the future empire. Unlike Aristotle, who viewed non-Greeks as barbarians, the Macedonian Alexander was less prejudiced, and would come to rely on conquered Persians and other foreigners to play prominent roles governing his far-flung territory.

Alexander was a handsome youth with shoulder-length blond hair, prominent forehead, ruddy complexion and "a certain melting look in his eyes." Historical sources suggest Alexander was bisexual, an orientation that bore no stigma in his day. He had at least two male lovers - his childhood friend and fellow soldier Hephaestion, and the Persian eunuch Bagoas - and fathered a child with his Sogdian wife, Roxane, and perhaps one with his Persian mistress. Even so, he had an ambivalent attitude toward sex. "Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal," he supposedly once remarked.

Raised to believe that he was descended from both the Greek heroes Achilles and Herakles, the young Alexander acquired a zealous reverence for the ancient Greek myths. He loved to recite passages from the plays of Euripides, and he slept with a dagger and a well-thumbed copy of the Iliad beneath his pillow during his campaigns.

In the year 336 B.C., as Philip entered an outdoor theater to preside over a wedding, he was fatally stabbed by a bodyguard named Pausanias. Although it was widely rumored that Olympias, recently rejected by the king in favor of a younger wife, colluded in the murder, Lane Fox says the idea that her son had a hand in the assassination is "a bit wild."

Nevertheless, Stone's film, playing with the son's possible Oedipal feelings for Olympias, keeps both of them on the hook. "Anybody who's a dramatist has to ask if Alexander and his mother had a role in Philip's death," the director counters with a conspiratorial grin. Unlike Oedipus, who did not know the man he killed was his father at the time of the murder, Alexander would have been fully aware of his crime's enormity.

Just 20 years old, Alexander seized the throne, summarily murdering or exiling a number of rivals. Within a year, he reasserted control over the recalcitrant cities and tribes that had frustrated Philip, expanding the boundaries of the Macedonian kingdom north to the Danube and west toward the Adriatic. When Thebes revolted, he slaughtered or sold into slavery some 30,000 citizens, then razed the city, except for temples and the house of the revered poet Pindar. After this example, Athens and the other Greek cities -with the stubborn exception of Sparta-pledged allegiance to the young king. Perhaps more important, they also promised him soldiers and financial support for an invasion of Persia.

In May 334 B.C., Alexander sailed his army three miles across the Hellespont (Dardanelles strait) in present-day Turkey, casting his spear into the sandy shore to dramatically claim all of Asia as his "spear-won prize," in the Roman historian Curtius' vivid first-century imagery.

After defeating an advance Persian force at the Granicus River 60 miles northeast of Troy and fighting all across Asia Minor, Alexander faced off against the Persian king Darius III at Issus in southern Turkey. Though sources disagree on the exact numbers, Alexander probably faced a larger force of Persians, across a narrow plain. Alexander's cavalry, backed by archers and by infantry wielding i6-foot-long pikes, smashed through the enemy in well-orchestrated charges. Alexander spurred Bucephalas headlong toward Darius, who spun his chariot around in retreat and ultimately made a successful getaway

The conquest continued. Following a grinding, seven-month siege, Alexander captured the island fortress of Tyre, in present-day Lebanon; Egyptians, oppressed by the Persians, welcomed him as a liberator. Sailing down the Nile to the Mediterranean, the 24-year-old sovereign came across a former Persian fortress with a superb natural harbor that he chose as the site of his future Egyptian capital, the first of several Alexandrias he would establish as he swept east.

The young ruler still craved a clear-cut victory to lay claim to all of Persia. Darius, meanwhile, was conscripting a stupendous new army from the farthest reaches of his empire, gathering his forces in the Persian winter capital of Babylon. The Persian ruler (who hadn't taken Alexander seriously enough the first time they faced off) finally marched more than 200,000 men 275 miles north to the open plain at Gaugamela, where he deployed cavalry clad in chain mail, chariots equipped with scythe blades on their wheels, and mounted elephants.

With 47,000 men, Alexander was spectacularly outnumbered. When his senior generals advised him to attack at night to even the odds, he indignantly retorted, "I will not demean myself by stealing victory like a thief" The king slept late on the day of battle, coolly emerging with an all-or-nothing plan. He ordered one wing of his cavalry to charge Darius' far left flank, another to aim for the far right, leaving his own infantry vulnerable in the center. As Darius' mounted corps tore away in opposite directions to meet the Macedonian squadrons, Alexander spurred a wedge of riders straight into the heart of the Persian ranks, splitting them in two. The gamble worked. Within minutes, the battle turned into a debacle. The Persians sounded a retreat, and Darius again slipped away on horseback.

After Alexander occupied Babylon, he continued his triumphant march east to Persepolis, the ceremonial center of Persia. He marveled at the dazzling gilt, bronze and marble palace and the hundred-columned hall where kings reigned from a golden throne. Inside the treasury he seized 3,000 tons of gold and silver, among the richest hoards in history

Alexander and his officers celebrated with a feast. The inebriated king grabbed a torch and set fire to the tapestries and beams of the massive palace. Other drunken revelers joined him, stoking the inferno to the accompaniment of flutes and singing. Within hours, Persia's hallowed shrine was a smoking ruin.

Darius ranged across the countryside in what is now northern Iran, trying to rebuild his devastated army. Alexander, in pursuit, caught up with him too late. Bessus, one of the monarch's own generals, had murdered Darius and proclaimed himself king. At about this time, Alexander was making a critical transformation, one that would later alienate his troops but lead to a dramatic cultural shift. Hoping to solidify control over his new territories, he adopted Persian dress and customs and invited former adversaries into his inner circle. To win the support of his new subjects, Alexander even ordered a royal burial in Persepolis for Darius. But "the sight of their young king parading in outlandish robes, and on intimate terms with the quacking, effeminate barbarian nobles he had so lately defeated, filled [his troops] with genuine disgust," Green writes in his biography Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.

When Alexander was informed that disgruntled soldiers were plotting to kill him, he arrested seven of the alleged conspirators, including Philotas, the son of Parmenio, a venerated general who had fought under both Philip and Alexander. Although the evidence against Philotas was weak, he and the others were stoned to death. Then, anticipating that Parmenio would seek revenge for his son's execution, Alexander had the yo-year-old commandant stabbed to death. The killings had a chilling effect on Alexander's men. "From now on, Alexander never trusted his troops," Green says. "The feeling was mutual."

BUT ALEXANDER STILL thirsted for conquest. He led his unhappy men over the Hindu Kush, to capture Bessus and take control of his home province of Bactria in what is now northern Afghanistan. Crossing the n,6oo-foot snowbound passes in April, many of the soldiers suffered severe frostbite and snow blindness. Bessus and his Persian troops, caught off-guard by Alexander's risky offensive, retreated into Sogdiana (present-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan). But Bessus' Sogdian allies, fearing Alexander's attack, handed him over. Alexander ordered Bessus' ears and nose cut off, then likely had him crucified.

In just five years, Alexander had toppled the mighty Persian Empire and expanded his empire eastward 2,500 miles. Yet he was far from content, and his control over his men was slipping. In the summer of 328 B.C., Alexander set up headquarters in Maracanda (now Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan). When he started boasting about his victories at yet another drunken banquet, Cleitus, a grizzled cavalry officer who had saved Alexander's life at the Granicus River, bluntly reminded him how much he owed his father and the Macedonian veterans. Incensed, Alexander accused Cleitus and other senior officers of cowardice. "Those who died defending you are the lucky ones," Cleitus roared back at him. "At least they never lived to see Macedonians thrashed with Median rods or kow-towing to Persians before they can have an audience with their own king!" Screaming that this was yet another plot against him, Alexander grabbed a spear and ran his beloved comrade through the chest, killing him instantly. Immediately, the king was possessed by remorse. Yanking the spear out of Cleitus' body, he tried to impale himself on it. After a few officers jerked it away from him, he shut himself up in his tent for days, grieving.

Eventually, Alexander rallied, prodding his multinational crew of Macedonian, Persian and Bactrian soldiers toward the next goal: India. En route, the 28-year-old became smitten with Roxane, a princess captured in the siege of a Sogdian fortress and "the loveliest woman in Asia, after Darius's wife," according to Arrian, a second-century Greek biographer rarely given to exaggeration. Marrying for love in 327 B.C., the pragmatic Alexander also calculated that an alliance with a noble family from outer Persia would help legitimize his power.

Pushing farther east to the Hydaspes River (now the Jhelum River in Pakistan), the Macedonians faced off against the Indian king Porus at a crossing some 70 miles southeast of present-day Islamabad. Alexander's 50,000 troops vanquished a force of 35,000 soldiers and 200 mounted elephants, but his men proved no match for monsoon season. "It was pelting with rain, the men were terrified, there were snakes everywhere," says Lane Fox. "They were lost and did not feel they could go on any more."

Standing in front of the assembled ranks near the Hyphasis River, Coenus, a senior commander, did the unthinkable: he pleaded with Alexander to go home. Furious, the young king said that anyone who left would be considered a deserter, then stormed off to sulk in his tent for two days. But when Alexander's personal seer reported that the signs to continue east into India were unfavorable, the king used this excuse to save face and turn back to Macedonia. On hearing of Alexander's change of heart, the exhausted veterans erupted in cheers. Even in retreat, the contrarian Alexander scorned the known route home - back over the Hindu Kush to Babylon-in favor of leading his flotilla of 1,800 ships down the unfamiliar Jhelum, Chenab and Indus rivers to the Indian Ocean and hence west to the Persian Gulf.

It was far from smooth sailing. En route, hostile tribes put up fierce resistance-and were pitilessly exterminated. Cartledge views this trail of blood as one prolonged "fit of frustration at having been forced by his own troops to turn back." In July 325, nine months after setting sail, the Macedonians finally reached the Indian Ocean.

Still focused on building his empire, Alexander concocted an audacious scheme to revive ancient sea routes for transporting gold, spices, ivory and precious stones from India to the Middle East. The idea was that ships carrying food and supplies would sail up the coast of the Arabian Sea while Alexander led soldiers over a parallel inland route. The ships would drop off food for the army at prearranged intervals, while the soldiers in turn would supply the fleet with fresh water. If this land-sea relay made it to the Persian Gulf on a dry run, merchants could follow the same itinerary.

The scheme would prove to be one of Alexander's gravest mistakes, subjecting his men to what Lane Fox calls "the most hellish march that [he] could possibly have chosen." In the oppressive night-the only time the sprawling caravan could move -the temperature seldom dipped below 95 degrees. Worst of all, monsoon winds delayed the fleet after Alexander's departure; the navy and army never met up, forcing both to subsist on the limited food and water they had brought with them. Reportedly, by the end of the two-month march, 15,000 of Alexander's men, or nearly half of the corps accompanying him, had perished - more than all the men killed in battle. The fleet, in contrast, reached the Iranian coast almost intact.

Back in Kirman, Persia, Alexander did little to mend relations with his men. He executed 6 of 20 provincial governors, and deposed two more. Then, in what Cartledge describes as a "reign of terror," he executed 600 men from his own garrisons for rape and pillaging in his absence. At Susa, he commanded 90 of his officers to marry aristocratic Persian women to strengthen the political bonds between Macedonians and Persians.

Despite the growing tensions-and crises like the sudden death of his lover, the soldier Hephaestion-Alexander still "hunted, diced, played ball, joked and banqueted" with his men. At one of these banquets, Alexander downed his usual enormous quantity of wine, then collapsed with a fever. Iwelve days later, on June 10, 323 B.C., he died, probably of malaria. Just before he expired, he was asked to name a successor. Alexander weakly answered that the empire should go "to the strongest," Arrian wrote. "I foresee a great funeral contest over me."

With Alexander gone, the empire was riven by dissent, with his commanders fighting over territory Roxane and her son, Alexander IV, born six weeks after the king's death, were murdered by a distant relative when the boy was 12 or 13; so was the king's mother, Olympias. As Alexander's embalmed body was being transported to Macedonia in a magnificent chariot, Ptolemy hijacked it to Alexandria, where it would stay for six centuries. Lane Fox speculates that the coffin later disappeared, probably destroyed in riots in the third century A.D.

Although Alexander's empire splintered shortly after his death, Greek arts, science and culture continued to pervade Middle Eastern and Asian societies for centuries. In Egypt, Greek physicians taught the study of human anatomy. In Babylon, Greek physicists devised a technique to electroplate silver to copper. Greek city planning prevailed in the many towns the king had established and was widely adopted elsewhere. Greek myths and philosophy spread well beyond the former empire's borders.

Alexander's legacy has long been a matter of debate. Cleitarchus, a fourth-century B.C. historian from Alexandria, portrays the king as a cruel, paranoid alcoholic. Eratosthenes of Gyrene, a third-century B.C. scholar at the Alexandria library, suggests that Alexander's conquests opened the eyes of the Greeks to other civilizations. Plutarch ventures the opposite-that Alexander civilized Persians, Sogdians and others. Johannes Gustav Droysen, a 19th-century German historian, proposes that the Macedonian king wanted above all to unify the entire world. Yet the modern historian Brian Bosworth dismisses such idealism, comparing Alexander's Indian campaign to Cortez's genocidal war against the Aztecs and condemning the king as a coldblooded imperialist.

Lane Fox says that "the fashion of the moment is to take a sour view of Alexander." But he adds: "You've still got to explain why so many people followed him with such devotion for so long."

"These days," says director Stone, a Vietnam veteran, "we have a strong antipathy for conquerors, but in Alexander's time, war was a way of life and soldiering a much more honorable profession."

As many historians conclude, it was his achievements as a commander on the field of battle that justify the name Alexander the Great. He was a military genius, and a hero to his men. He never asked them to do something he would not do himself, and he bore the wounds to prove it. He also shared his vast riches with his men. When he challenged his army to take the most difficult route, to do the impossible, they amazed themselves when they succeeded. At the Hyphasis River near Amritsar, when his soldiers pressured him to turn back, they may well have been too hasty. Alexander's promised land of India was nearly in their grasp.

Nowhere did Alexander articulate what was behind his all-consuming desire to master the world. To speculate that he was trying to surpass his father and win his mother's love, as some psychohistorians have done, is to take the easy way out. It may be, as Ptolemy wistfully concludes in the Stone film, that Alexander was blessed and cursed with an eternally unsatisfied longing, a pothos even he could not fathom. Perpetually racing the gods, his destiny remained exactly where it served him best-just out of reach.

[Author Affiliation]

Paris-based author RICHARD COVINGTON last wrote for SMITHSONIAN about Cambodia's Angkor temples in February 2004.