Alexander the Great, missing in action

ALEXANDER the Great is perhaps the greatest military commander in history, and certainly the greatest conqueror.

Alexander the Great tapestry

ALEXANDER the Great is perhaps the greatest military commander in history, and certainly the greatest conqueror, for although conquest is a perennial fact of history, conquerors are not all the same.

There are, at one extreme, those who have no other object than rape and pillage, like Attila and his hordes, or indeed the Vikings. Then there are barbarians who invade civilised lands, as the Mongols overran China, but are amenable to conversion. And finally there are those like Alexander, who conquer in part at least as the bearers of civilisation and enlightenment. This is clearly how Napoleon thought of his own campaigns in Europe.

Conduct during and after warfare is naturally a crucial test of the good and the bad conqueror. The bad are cruel, merciless and sadistic in warfare and oppressive rulers thereafter; the good are - in theory at least - moderate in their use of force, just and even merciful to those they have defeated. For all his occasional lapses, Alexander seemed to exemplify these moral virtues which, combined with his youth, beauty and charisma, made him the greatest exemplar of a glorious monarch that modern rulers could aspire to or celebrate as a discreet way of advertising their own rule.

Thus Alexander was adopted as a symbol in the early years of Louis XIV's reign, before the Sun King determined, at the apogee of his military success, to celebrate himself more explicitly in the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. And it is the series of engravings after Charles Le Brun's cycle of paintings that greets visitors at the opening of the Australian Museum's Alexander exhibition. The first subject in the series, The Tent of Darius, is also reproduced, larger than the original scale, in a tapestry in the next room.

This was the painting that the young Louis XIV, who had just assumed control of the government on the death of Mazarin, watched Le Brun create in 1661, and which convinced him he had found the painter of his reign.

The picture tells a famous story of Alexander's generosity. After the flight of the defeated Persian king Darius, Alexander visited his wife, mother and the other women of the family. As he entered the tent, Darius's mother mistakenly prostrated herself before Alexander's companion Hephaestion; but instead of flying into the sort of murderous rage that might be expected of a slighted oriental despot, Alexander dismissed this error as of no importance and extended his protection to the royal family. All the figures in the composition were carefully devised by Le Brun to respond to this event with a range of expressions from fear or wonder to admiration.

Le Brun followed this important painting with a series of monumental compositions dealing with the battles of Alexander, showing both his personal valour and his magnanimity towards his defeated enemies, pictures so enormous that they could not be displayed at the Louvre until its ambitious expansion under president Francois Mitterrand; now they hang in a dedicated gallery upstairs. But it is worth spending time with these prints, for they are not only reproductions of a set of famous paintings, but probably the most beautiful reproductive engravings made, executed by two extraordinarily talented artists, Gerard Audran and Gerard Edelinck, under the direction of Le Brun himself. No trouble or expense was spared to produce masterpieces intended as a demonstration both of Le Brun's genius and of the inimitable technical standard that French art had attained under Louis XIV.

From this prelude devoted to the image of Alexander in modern times, we enter the exhibition proper and find ourselves surrounded by objects from his lifetime in the second half of the fourth century BC and from the vast world to which Greek civilisation was spread by his conquests, which followed those by which his father Philip had united Greece. For unlike Rome, Greece had never been a nation or had a single centre; it had always been a constellation of independent and instinctively competitive city-states, proliferating by colonisation all over the Mediterranean, and especially around the Aegean and in Sicily and southern Italy.

A sense of fellowship as a people was fortified by the struggles, in the early fifth century, against the Persians and other non-Greeks such as the Carthaginians and Etruscans, and Pindar wrote memorably that Hellas was wherever Hellenes dwelt. But it was not until after the eclipse of the power of Athens and Sparta that many of the Greek states were forcibly brought together into a single political entity by Philip of Macedon. The unprecedented territorial conquests of his son led to the spread of Greek culture, Greek art and the Greek language as a lingua franca and, significantly, a more accessible vehicle of literacy to lands from Egypt to Persia and what is now Pakistan, laying the foundations for the international and multi-ethnic culture of the Hellenistic period.

Because this exhibition comes from the Hermitage, it includes many fascinating items from the Hellenistic centres of the Black Sea, such as the greaves and breastplate adorned with a gorgon's head that strike us with a vivid glimpse of the violence and terror of warfare, always too easy to gloss over when we speak of ancient history. In the Hellenistic work from these frontier lands, as well as the more familiar centres in Egypt and Syria, we see Greece expanding but also being affected by the peoples and cultures that it encounters. Habits changed on both sides and there were stresses. It was hard for the orientals to overcome their taboos about nudity to attend baths and gymnasiums; on the other hand, the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt had to adapt to popular expectations of a pharaoh, and Ptolemy II Philadelphus was so called because he married his sister, overcoming a Greek - and indeed universal - taboo in order to play the part of a god-king.

In one of Theocritus's poems, we hear a couple of Greek matrons in Alexandria talking about the Egyptians rather as English ladies in India might have talked about the locals there. Again, the ancients were used to finding equivalences between their deities and those of other peoples, but the Greek rulers of Egypt had to develop the new figure of Serapis as a fusion of Zeus and the indigenous deity Apis. The colossal bust of Serapis, with its classical but bland expression, faraway gaze and the extraordinarily undercut locks of hair that hang over its forehead, is one of the most striking pieces in the exhibition. Cults such as his spread in turn to Rome as most of the old Hellenistic world was eventually assimilated into the Roman Empire.

The farthest reach of Hellenism was into Afghanistan - the ancient kingdom of Bactria - and Gandhara in the Indus Valley, the site of one of the most crucial junctures between the civilisations of Europe and Asia, for it was here, when the kingdom adopted Buddhism, that Gautama was first represented in human form, based, like the early images of Christ, on the ideal, youthful figures of Apollo and Dionysus. Greek forms are clearly visible in the Gandharan heads assembled in one display case, but the open eyes and alert gaze of their models are already changed to eyes half-closed and a gaze turned inwards.

But if aspects of the Hellenistic world emerge quite vividly from this exhibition, there remains something of a void at its centre, in the figure of the great conqueror himself. It is particularly the lack of a portrait that is striking. Further on, indeed, we may discover a couple of coins that purport to record the features of Alexander: it was a powerful new idea, which survives to this day, to use coinage as a vehicle for publicising the image of the monarch throughout his dominions. But where one might expect a portrait bust to serve as a focus for the whole exhibition, there is nothing.

It is of course merely an accident of the history of collections that the Hermitage does not have a substantial portrait like those in the Louvre or the British Museum, but the absence of Alexander is made all the more conspicuous by the minutely detailed portraits of such contemporaries as Aeschines and Demosthenes, and even more poignantly by several images that might have been, but are not in fact, effigies of the king. Thus a small seated Heracles is said to be based on one by Lysippus with the features of Alexander, but they have not survived the copying process; and the famous Gonzaga cameo, a magnificent carved gem long prized as a portrait of Alexander, turns out to be someone else altogether, possibly Ptolemy II Philadelphus - already mentioned - and his sister-wife Arsinoe II.

The void is filled, in a sense, by an impressive, if late and restored, statue of Dionysus from Frascati, which dominates the first part of the exhibition. In contrast with the nearby artefacts evoking warfare or the decorative objects made by Hellenised barbarians, the figure of the god has a serene presence, the result of a kind of synthesis that has taken place between the earlier irrational figure of Dionysus and the lucid Apollo.

But the youthful, androgynous and yet commanding Dionysus particularly recalls Alexander in his beardless features. While the Romans were clean-shaven, the Greeks generally allowed the beard to grow once it had developed, so that beardlessness signified one was not yet a fully grown man: in the statues of Apollo and later Dionysus, the smooth cheeks represented the eternal youth of these deities, as opposed to the full beard of Zeus or Poseidon. Alexander would have been beardless when he entered public life at the age of 16 and perhaps even when the assassination of his father in 336 BC forced him to take control of the kingdom at just 20. Thereafter it must have been a bold choice, preferring a god-like image of eternal youth to conventional signs of masculinity.

As the young genius irresistibly crushed all opponents, any murmurs about the smooth cheeks and flowing locks brushed back from the forehead evaporated, and after his death all his successors aspired to imitate him. Perhaps the most striking illustration of the diffusion of the Alexander look is in an otherwise rather ugly and clumsy late head of Achilles.

In his youth and as a passionate reader of The Iliad, Alexander had aspired to emulate the valour and heroism of the Homeric hero, and indeed was uncannily like him in his combination of courage, greatness of heart and sometimes excessive sorrow or anger. But the mark he himself made on history was so powerful that even his own model, the "best of the Achaeans", came to be represented in the image of the Macedonian conqueror.

Alexander The Great: 2000 Years Of Treasures. The Australian Museum, Sydney, To April 28