Why does there seem to be so little creative energy put into Alexander and the Diodachi?
It has everything the more popular Caesar has and ten times more.
I looked, and there's two definition-of-mediocre TV shows, one above-average anime that might actually ironically be the best Alexander media created, an awful Oliver Stone movie, and a couple histfict trilogies that seem to get panned for either weak writing or being overly sexualized (I'm not looking for romantic fiction, gay or otherwise).
Caesar has endless content, much of it top notch, and even Sulla has solid content despite being a lesser known (popularly) figure, and even the more boring Roman emperors get regular attention, like Claudius, Titus, and Aurelius (at least he wrote a book himself).
Is it because non-epic Greece just doesn't captivate Westerners as much; is it the homosexuality and centuries of strict Christian mores downplaying Alex; is it that despite his immense success, he was the very definition of flash in the pan and he failed to really "build" anything other than a transient collection of endlessly squabbling Greek rulers?
His life and his successors' are pure soap opera, war movie, and power fantasy. Yet it's glassed over in HS history from what I recall and mostly discarded by our culture, while Homer remains far more popular.
I don't get.
Side question: were the ancient Greeks the most backstabbing, murdering, disloyal, fractious society to ever gain relevance?
The problem with Greece vs. Rome is that Rome co-opted the Greek gods, and while we know the Roman names, it's the Greek names that made it into popular mythology.
But mythology doesn't = history, so you're more apt to get Greek-themed adventure and fantasy, over actual history.
Xena: Warrior Princess is a prime example. I don't remember which season introduced Julius Caesar, but that show absolutely gutted the Roman-themed episodes that shoehorned Caesar's capture by pirates through to Caligula into about 35-40 years of in-universe time, 25 years of which were a time jump since Xena and Gabrielle spent it frozen in an ice cave. Ares placed them there in ice coffins after Julius had them crucified.
The Roman elements of this multi-season plotline are absolutely butchered. Xena was friends with Octavian before he became Augustus, and she asked him to watch over her daughter, Eve (foretold to become a peacemaker who would vanquish the Olympian gods). He agreed, but after Xena and Gabrielle woke up after their 25 years in the ice cave, they discovered that Eve had grown up, married Augustus, and was now known as Livia.
But this Livia was completely unlike any mentions of her in the history books. Xena's version of Livia was a wild warlord wannabe who enjoyed massacring innocent villagers and killing people in the arena... totally ignoring the fact that real-history Livia might have been insanely ambitious and cruel, but she accomplished her goals through manipulating people and left the physical stuff to people she either hired or manipulated into doing it for her.
So I find the Roman subplot of this series unwatchable. Other fans tell me "it's not a documentary" but honestly... at least
try to get parts of it right. The funny thing about it was that my friend who was a rabid Xena fan was upset about the part of the crucifixion scenes where the guards broke Xena and Gabrielle's legs. She thought that was going too far, and I explained that it was actually done as an act of mercy so they would die faster.
(About 15 years ago someone on another forum asked a favor of me - he said he was writing a Highlander fanfic about a soldier in the Republic who was executed for murdering one of the high-ranking Roman officials... and since I'd been studying Roman history for decades already, could I help him out with deciding what method of execution to use for this soldier that would trigger the process for him changing from a pre-Immortal to full Immortal? Obviously beheading wouldn't work so it would need to be some other method... it wasn't pleasant research, as the kind of death matters - slow death doesn't trigger the Immortal process; it has to be quick and violent - but I ended up presenting him with a list of methods and notes as to whether they would be appropriate, depending on the circumstances of the murder, the rank of the accused, whether he himself was an aristocrat or not, and so on. He picked one, wrote the story, and it turned out really good.
It seems that a lot of my historical research happens because I need to know about violent things; my current writing project sent me into researching various torture methods, how they worked, what the effects were on the human body, the psychology of it, if victims could recover, and so on.)
It's because William Shakespeare wrote an excellent play about Julius Caesar but not one about Alexander of Macedonia.
I haven't actually read either of his Roman plays. I should remedy that.
(Fun Star Trek fact: William Shatner is a classically-trained actor who appeared in Shakespeare plays in Stratford - Ontario, not England - prior to taking his career to the U.S. and becoming a TV/movie actor rather than a stage actor)
I actually didn't find Oliver Stone's movie to be bad. The battles were great, imo. The rest was simplified - but when doesn't that happen in such movies?
A movie about the Byzantine Empire would have a very large audience
Drop a note to whoever it was who optioned Robert Silverberg's novel
Up the Line. I belong to his email group and he told us awhile ago that the book had been optioned... which delighted me to hear because as soon as I read it in the early '80s I figured it would make one hell of a fun movie, and even had the two lead actors cast (Lou Gossett Jr. would have been perfect as Sam, and Joaquin Phoenix would have been perfect as Jud).
It's a time travel novel, in which the main characters are Time Couriers. Their job is to escort groups of tourists on one- or two-week holidays into the past, to experience daily life and major historical events, without getting into trouble (such as accidentally or deliberately changing history, stealing artifacts, and so on).
It just so happens that Jud Elliot was a history major, and his specialty was the Byzantine Empire. He meets Sam, who is a Time Courier (also specializing in "the Byzantium Run"), and he suggests that Jud apply to be a Time Courier (since Jud is unemployed at the time).
So Jud applies, gets accepted, and does his training with couriers specializing in various eras of American history (the thing about time travel in this novel is that if you want to go back in time to a particular date, you have to physically start from the location in the present to get to where you want to be in the past). Jud figures it's cheaper to train couriers in American tour groups instead of sending the trainees all over the world to wherever they intend to actually work.
The other Time Couriers are a weird bunch of people, with various interesting or creepy reasons for choosing this career. Some of them have figured out how to be successful criminals, profiting from illegally selling historical artifacts, and one of them has established an actual historical persona that made it into the history books. And then there's Courier Riley, whose specialty is the Black Death tours...
Silverberg sprinkles plenty of miscellaneous historical facts into the story, and it was the part about the Varangians that partly inspired my SCA persona.
So... does Jud get into temporal difficulties?
Of course he does.
The only problem with adapting this novel to a screenplay is the fact that Silverberg wrote it decades before certain things were considered unacceptable. There are some things that would need to be omitted or altered, such as the use of the "n-word" and there's enough instances of misogyny that a member of my Time Travel Novels Yahoo group informed me that she could not finish reading the book and Silverberg must be a horrible person to have written it.
Well, I've met Silverberg and had a chance to chat with him both times he was the Guest of Honor at the annual science fiction convention that used to be held in Calgary. He's not a horrible person - he's very interesting and while he's not writing new stuff anymore (he's in his mid-80s now, so retirement after a 60+ year career is reasonable), he's still actively posting in his email group.
So while one or two characters in the book have attitudes that modern audiences would find reprehensible, Silverberg himself is nothing like that.
It's too bad that it took this long for the book to be optioned. Joaquin Phoenix is too old to play Jud now.
The Byzantine Empire, more properly known as the eastern portion of the Roman Empire after it was split into two parts. The Western empire fell permanently in 476 CE, but the Eastern empire continued on for nearly another thousand years, until it was conquered in 1453.
By that time there wasn't much about it that was Roman, though. There's a valid reason why Kyriakos' old avatar was one of the Byzantine emperors. It was very much a Greek civilization, rather than Roman.
Check Paradox games or Total War.
