chapter 32 Alexander the Great Screaming Out for Hellenicity: Greek Songs and Political Dissent

Guendalina D.M. Taietti

In my study on the reception of Alexander the Great in Hellenic musical productions of the twentieth and twenty-first century, I have gathered ca. eighty Alexander-songs,1 which are characterized by a variety of linguistic registers and are composed in different languages: Ancient and Modern Greek, Greek dialects, and English. The Alexander-songs represent several genres, such as metal, rock, folk, rap, anthems, music for orchestra, and film scores (soundtracks) for Alexander-movies,2 and they cover various themes, including the personal experiences, desires, love affairs, and struggles of the Modern Greek man. They link everyday life and politics to the wide-spread myths and

1 For the collection of the “Alexander songs”, I did research on the online database of Greek songs stixoi.info and other music websites such as Discogs or Youtube. I also thank my Greek friends for the useful details on Modern Greek music they gave me. 2 Two are the soundtracks composed by Greeks for Alexander-films: Christodoulos Chalaris’ music for Theodoros Angelopoulos’ Megalexandros, shot in 1980, and Vangelis (Evangelos Odysseas Papathanasiou)’s film score Alexander, released in 2004 for Oliver Stone’s film, widely accredited for having the Oxford Professor Robin Lane Fox as historic advisor. For Megalexandros, see Giorgos Ziakas, Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος σε κοντινό πλάνο / Alexandre le Grand vu de pres (Athens: Editions Themelio, 1995); Dan Georgakas, “A Reconsideration of Theodoros Angelopoulos’s O Megalexandros”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18, no. 1 (2000): 171–182; Linda Myrsiades, “Heroic Identity in the Dilessi Affair, Aris Velouhiotis, and Alexander: A Reading of Angelopoulos’s Megalexandros”, College Literature 38, no. 4 (2011): 44–56. For Stone’s Alexander, see Angelos Chaniotis, “Making Alexander fit for the twenty-first century Oliver Stone’s Alexander”, in Hellas on Screen. Cinematic Receptions of Ancient History, Litera- ture and Myth, Habes 45, ed. Irene Berti and Marta García Morcillo (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008), 185–201; Ivana Petrovic, “Plutarch’s and Stone’s Alexander”, in Hellas on Screen. Cinematic Receptions of Ancient History, Literature and Myth, Habes 45, ed. Irene Berti and Marta García Morcillo (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008), 163–183; Paul Cartledge and Fiona Rose Greenland, “Introduction”, in Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander, ed. Paul Car- tledge and Fiona Rose Greenland (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 3–12; Joanna Paul, “Oliver Stone’s Alexander and the Cinematic Epic Tradition”, in Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander, ed. Paul Cartledge and Fiona Rose Greenland (Wisconsin: The Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 15–35.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004359932_033 796 taietti reinterpretations of the great conqueror that have flourished over the centuries since his lifetime and, according to the motifs deployed, we can categorize the Alexander-songs as historical, mythological, satirical, or political. However, these boundaries are fluid: some songs can be in fact allocated to more than one group, since historical and satirical songs are sometimes bearers of jingoistic motifs and political songs may be ironic in their style. The historical content encompasses Alexander’s deeds and ancient Greek history and culture, with a special focus on the Kingdom of Macedon and the city of Thessaloniki. Historical songs make wide use of tropes developed in the Classical and Hellenistic age, such as the polarity between the cultur- ally superior Greeks and the uneducated, violent barbarians,3 and Alexan- der’s invincibility on the battlefield and fondness for knowledge. The lyrics insist on the Greekness and on the sacredness of Macedonia, which is often described as holy land (ιερή γη). Alexander is always referred to as Greek or Greek-Macedonian:4 he represents Greece’s military and cultural hero, as he has the noble merit of having spread the Hellenic language and heritage to the entire oikoumene through his conquests. Amongst Alexander’s superhuman characteristics and unmatchable deeds praised in the songs, we can enumer- ate his divine descent (he was believed to be the offspring of Heracles), his glorious passage though Egypt, and the famous solving of the Gordian knot. These episodes, together with references to the most famous battles during the Persian campaign (Granicus, Issus, Gaugamela) are recalled in the lyrics in order to lend the songs a veneer of solid historical knowledge. Also members of Alexander’s family and entourage—Olympias, Philip, Aristotle, Hephaestion, Rhoxane, Bucephalus—and technical terms of the Macedonian army (pha- lanx, sarissa) are introduced to make the songs more effective and credible. Most of these melodies are music written with orchestral accompaniment, a genre characterized by the seriousness which is required by the narration of “historical national” facts.5 Two songs are rap tunes, a genre which normally

3 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 56–57; Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 99–100; Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 45–48; Jonathan M. Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 179. 4 When presented as a “Greek Macedonian”, Alexander is usually described with periphrastic expressions: for example, see the song Ύμνος του Αλεξάνδρου (Hymn to Alexander) in the play Ode for Alexander the Great (2004) performed by Petros Gaitanos, l. 1: Αλέξανδρος ο Έλληνας της γης των Μακεδόνων (Alexander the Greek from the Macedonians’ land). 5 The ancient history of the Macedonian Kingdom is considered an integral part of Greece’s