A king’s runaway. Reflections of a Pompeii’s mosaic in Robert Rossen’s alexander (1956) and Oliver Stone’s (2005)

The battle of Qadesh (1274 BC), the most important one of the Bronze Age and the greatest chariots battle of the History, was narrated by the two warring empires –the Egyptian and Hittite– as a victory, to the point that we still do not know today who really won. Perhaps that’s why the image that condenses the most decisive battle of the Ancient World until the appearance of Rome, Issos (333 BC), which confronted Alexander of Macedonia with Darius of Persia, is a recreation of the flight of the Achaemenid monarch riding his chariot before the the young Macedonian’s determined charge. That runaway would be almost identically repeated two years later, in Gaugamela’s Battle (331 BC). The wonderful roman mosaic founded in the Pompeiian House of the Faun (120-100 BC, Museo Nazionale Archeologico, Nápoles) captures with great beauty this instant of war –whether Issos or Gaugamela– which accredits an indisputable victory. It also implies the climax of the film Alexander (Oliver Stone, 2005): in the film, once the Battle of Gaugamela has ended with the fearful flight of Darius, the city of Babylon –a cyclorama of fifty meters long created by artist Steve Mitchell– welcomes the brave triumphant conqueror. As in the imitatio Alexandri of antiquity, or in the modern paintings by Brueghel, Altdorfer, Pietro da Cortona or Le Brun, Stone constructs the myth of Alexander on this precise moment which clearly determines the hero’s fate.