Alexander (the Great): an Oliver Stone Film

Interesting. I hadn’t even heard of this until I saw the trailer on Apple.com. I’m not a big Oliver Stone fan (since I think he has a tendency to make stuff up and then pass it off as history) but this one could be good.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/alexander/large.html

Maybe he can present Alexander as a liberator of the people, bringing enlightenment and proper Greek virtues to the whole world!

I love how the armies of Alexander, Troy, etc. seem to number into the hundreds of thousands in these movies.

Those battles were actually much bigger than anything the world would see until 1800 or so, but c’mon, man.

I didn’t see too many huge army shots in the trailer, and the largest one could have been Gaugamela. The Persian army there was in the 75-100k range. Even a crowd of forty thousand looks like a lot of people. It is too early to criticize the movie based on unrealistic army sizes.

Baz Luhrmann has an Alexander movie coming out next year, with DiCaprio as the star. If Leo bulks up a little, he could actually be the perfect Alexander.

The Stone movie looks pretty, and I wonder if Farrell can actually carry a movie - he hasn’t shown himself up to the task yet.

Troy

But he was Macedonian - ah nevermind.

But he was Macedonian - ah nevermind.[/quote]

Who considered himself Greek. His father was named hegemon of the Greek peoples and brought Aristotle to his court to teach Alexander. He spoke Greek and exported Greek ideas, while adopting some Persian ones.

The Macedonians were an ethnic mix of Thracians and Greeks, but culturally, they were Greek by the reign of Alexander. (Not that the other Greek peoples were convinced. Philip was considered a barbarian by many of them.)

Troy

Baz Luhrmann shouldn’t be allowed to make movies.

Also: I hope this is like Reign.

Thucydides wrote:

We have therefore no right to be sceptical, nor to content ourselves with an inspection of a town to the exclusion of a consideration of its power; but we may safely conclude that the armament in question surpassed all before it, as it fell short of modern efforts; if we can here also accept the testimony of Homer’s poems, in which, without allowing for the exaggeration which a poet would feel himself licensed to employ, we can see that it was far from equalling ours. He has represented it as consisting of twelve hundred vessels; the Boeotian complement of each ship being a hundred and twenty men, that of the ships of Philoctetes fifty.

That sounds to me like he’s calling the Greek army beseiging Troy around 100,000 strong, and implying that the forces marshalled for the Peloponnesian War were larger still.

Source is Crawley’s translation.

That’s insanity! Love them or hate them, Luhrmann’s movies are really amazing. I think Moulin Rouge is one of the best uses of film as a medium I have ever seen.

Although I always found it odd that Hollywood made movies in twos (Saving Private Ryan, Thin Red Line; All the disaster movies; Harry Potter and LOTR; there are others now, I can’t remember…)

if only it were Ferrell, it’d be a cinch :wink:

You sure about that? I thought some of the Germanic armies Gaius Marius fought around 100 B.C. were 200,000+ in size.

You sure about that? I thought some of the Germanic armies Gaius Marius fought around 100 B.C. were 200,000+ in size.[/quote]

The Germanic invasions in the late 2nd century BC were mass migrations, though, so you are talking about every able bodied male in the Cimbric migrants taking up a sword or horse.

100K is not out of the realm of possibility for some ancient armies, but rare. Caesar didn’t face German armies this size when he crossed the Rhine, and Germanicus defeated smaller (more typical) German armies in the early empire. Caesar occasionally met a Gaulish army that topped 50,000 - though that could get bigger if the women put up a fight when the Romans reached the camp. Mithridates the Great (wtih his ally Tigranes of Armenia) could cobble together a pretty big army, but his forces usually numbered in the 35-70k range.

The ancient estimates are notoriously unreliable, as much history was written to make victories seem like battles against unbeatable odds. So you hear about Alexander beating one army of 600k at Issus and then another one of 1 million two years later at Gaugamela, losing only a handful of his own men in the process. In both of these battles, 100k men is actually a sizeable discount from the reported numbers but eminently believable for both of these battles.

The larger armies you hear about are almost exclusively from countries with conscripted troops or a tribal war system. “Civilized” countries with citizen soliders usually had smaller armies because the manpower had to be taken away from the fields and cities and didn’t have the population to spare.

Troy

Although I always found it odd that Hollywood made movies in twos (Saving Private Ryan, Thin Red Line; All the disaster movies; Harry Potter and LOTR; there are others now, I can’t remember…)

IIRC, isn’t this due to competing studios trying to crank out similar movies to compete with one another? Dante’s Peak and Volcano, Armageddon and Deep Impact, etc.

The problem is, there’s no way to confirm those numbers, and there’s every reason to believe that they’re badly exaggerated. There was just no way to logistically feed armies of that size until Napolean - they had to largely, if not completely, forage and live off of the land. A Greek army the size of the one besieging Troy in the movie would have starved very quickly.

Aside from instances where the population essentially rose up to confront an aggressor (like the Germans vs. the Romans), there are very few instances in history where powers had standing armies larger that a few thousand people, and those tend to be very rich societies (Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans). They also didn’t have feudal societies, so it wasn’t easy to “mass conscript” the populace into much larger armies against their will.

Btw, Colin Farrell? As Alexander? Tell me this doesn’t look ridiculous:

http://www.abjecthubris.com/images/farrell.jpg

Most scholars subtract a good third of the numbers from antiquity, just because of the bullshit factor. Armies generally just weren’t that big. Particularly as you got into the Roman era. Rome managed that empire with a pretty small number of troops. Casual people think that legionaries were everywhere, but the truth is that the number of soldiers was almost always pretty small and stretched very, very thin. The mystique of Rome kept the empire going more than anything else. Then the third century hit and that legend bit the dust.

True - A Legion was only 10000 men. A large roman army would be made up of 2-3 legions working together. so 30k tops. They did fight larger opposition armies but better technology usually put the odds in their favor.

Wow…that’s really bad.

–Dave

True - A Legion was only 10000 men. A large roman army would be made up of 2-3 legions working together. so 30k tops. They did fight larger opposition armies but better technology usually put the odds in their favor.[/quote]

A legion was even smaller than that - 5 to 6 thousand men. And that was at full strength, which was pretty rare.

Troy

…and Rome had the biggest armies of any nation until 1800 Napolean.

All you really needed was a well trained group the size of the average football game live audience to conquer the world, heh.