SOME talk of Alexander. And some do little else. In a life that lasted just 32 years but an afterlife spanning 24 centuries, Alexander the Great has spawned innumerable books and novels (some 700 are now in print, with a dozen last year alone), films, advertising campaigns for soap and cigarettes, heavy metal rock lyrics (most notably by Iron Maiden) and a luxury suite at Donald Trump's casino-hotel in Atlantic City. Now, thanks to the film director Oliver Stone, Alexander has given birth to a turkey. Not one of those handy self-basting jobs that will fit into a conventional oven, but a huge, gobbling multimillion-dollar monster, now being slowly roasted and dismembered by film critics everywhere. Not since Alexander received an Indian arrow in the chest during the siege of Multan in 325BC and had to be carried off the battlefield on the shield of Achilles has the Macedonian conqueror come under such sustained and ferocious attack.

Alexander is, indeed, an heroically bad movie, its very worst aspect being Colin Farrell’s hairstyle in the title role: a sort of centre-parted, blond-highlighted man-mane, Farrah Fawcett meets Wham-era George Michael. The long debate over how Alexander died has now been superseded by an argument over how, exactly, Colin Farrell was dyed. Farrell’s Alexander wears eyeliner and a fetching leather miniskirt and makes nudge-nudge eyes at his bosom-buddy Hephaistion. The heavy hint of homosexuality has proved too much for Middle America, which has balked violently at the suggestion that the King of Macedon was also a Friend of Dorothy.

There is little evidence about Alexander’s sexuality, and it is highly unlikely that he and Hephaistion were adult lovers. But in creating his own, controversial image of the conqueror, Stone is merely following tradition, for Alexander has always been a figment, in part, of imagination, even while he lived. No figure from history comes so laden with myth.

Earlier legends, such as those of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, were effortlessly absorbed into the Alexander übermyth. Ancient Rome added its own slant of hero-worship and bestowed the title “Great”. For 19th-century empire builders, Alexander was the role model, bringing civilisation to the benighted heathen while slaying and enslaving them in droves. The Sixties version of the hero was acclaimed by Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra as a sort of UN hippie missionary: “One world, one nation, one people living in peace.” Today we emphasise that Alexander adopted the customs and dress of the Persians he had defeated and treated his captives humanely (when he didn’t chop their noses off), making him a slightly uncomfortable model of multicultural conquest. Alexander has even popped up on both sides of the war debate, with Bush supporters lauding Alexander's robust neocon approach to invading the Middle East, and opponents citing his campaigns as evidence of how to win the war and then lose the peace.

Alexander is in the eye of the beholder: a military genius to some, a salutary figure of hubris to others, a despot, hero, visionary or mass-murderer. The prewar Alexander popularised by the influential classical scholar Sir William Tarn was a clean-limbed, almost asexual visionary; the Alexander played by Richard Burton in the 1955 film was a bed-hopping strictly hetero hero; Farrell’s Alexander is bisexual and troubled, a crazy mixed-up Macedonian.

Alexander, then, is partly what you want to make of him, and not just in terms of his sexuality. At various times, and often based on evidence ranging from slim to non-existent, he has been portrayed as a Freemason, a diabetic, a cat-hater, left-handed, the ancestor of the Turkana tribe of northern Kenya, the inventor of chess, an alchemist and a borderline lunatic with an Oedipus complex who slept with snakes in his bed. Alexander’s early death has been variously ascribed to leprosy, murder, syphilis, typhoid, panic attacks, infected monkey bite, West Nile virus, and being, in the words of Rowley Birkitt, QC, from The Fast Show, very, very drunk. Indeed, given the array of ailments he has been diagnosed with over the centuries, it is amazing Alexander survived to the age of 32.

Oliver Stone has a penchant for unsubstantiated conspiracy, as demonstrated in his egregious JFK, and in light of this his decision to portray the hero merely as Alexander the Probably Slightly Gay seems quite restrained: he might easily have given us Alexander the Left-Handed Cat-Hating African Syphilitic Booze-hound and Freemason.

Any attempt to “understand” Alexander necessarily involves guesswork, or fantasy, for there is little reliable evidence for what he thought or felt about anything. We are fascinated by the mind of Alexander because we know so little about it; instead we can only extrapolate his character from what we know of his behaviour, and above all from his actions.

Those actions are perhaps too epic for any movie epic to encompass. Alexander was king at 20, conquered the mighty Persian empire at 22, crossed the Hindu Kush and the Indus, to reach the edge of the world as it was then. He was proclaimed a living god and died on his way home, all before his 33rd birthday. Beyond all the conjecture and projection of our own concerns on to ancient times, the posthumous rummaging around in a subconscious we can never know, what Alexander did still resonates in the historical imagination, and will do so long after the clamour surrounding Stone's interpretation has died away.

“He was a force of nature…a colossus,” intones Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) in the Stone script. Well, yes; but having to be told that by way of buckets of blood and Revlon Frost and Glow Highlights somehow diminishes Alexander's achievement. The facts still speak louder, 24 centuries later.

Travelling through northern Afghanistan some years ago, I came across a young man dressed in traditional Pathan tribal costume, but with unmistakably Caucasian features, blue eyes and fair hair. Some Afghan tribes claim descent from Alexander's soldiers, lost as his army struggled across the mountains and deep into modern-day Tajikistan, there to found Alexandria in Eschate, Alexandria-at-the-End-of-the-World. To me, that natural blond encountered high in Hindu Kush was a more profound reflection of Alexander's greatness than any amount of Hollywood hair dye.

Join the Debate
Send your e-mails to debate@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden