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What a sick... and twisted society this is...
Here is the event - http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/events_calendar/event_detail.aspx?eventId=61
And here is an article we discovered that speaks about this new theory. But before you read that we would just like to advise this British professor that he should shift his focus on other more important subjects such as the scandalous British pedophile case with Jimmy Savile and other such subjects, before going off and ranting about someone whom the Greek people (and not only) respect and honor. If he is a professor of classics, then he should be educating the world on the Greekness of the Parthenon Marbles, and how unjust it was for British elites to pillage them from their rightful country!
Oliver Stone’s 2004 film Alexander portrayed the great Macedonian king as bisexual. Was he also a transvestite? Tony Spawforth looks to uncover the truth.
This startling claim was made by a contemporary Greek, Ephippus, in his lost pamphlet depicting Alexander’s court in the last two years of the reign (324-323 BC). In a surviving fragment Ephippus alleges that the king liked to cross-dress as Artemis, the Greek archer-goddess of the hunt. Supposedly Alexander often appeared in her guise ‘on his chariot, dressed in the Persian garb, just showing above his shoulders the bow and the hunting-spear’.
Chariot and bow were stock attributes of Artemis in Greek art but she did not wear ‘Persian garb’. Remarkably, Alexander did. Xenophobic Greeks routinely derided Persian costume as womanly. A sardonic Ephippus was put in mind of the Greek iconography of Artemis when he saw Alexander in his Persian robes going out to hunt on a chariot and armed with a bow.
The passage that resulted is a libel. Most Greeks would have seen a king who impersonated the gods in this way as an arrogant autocrat inviting divine retribution. Ephippus was no fan of the world-conqueror, whose father Philip had destroyed his home city of Olynthus in 348 BC. Indeed, despite the nationalist fervor which Alexander’s memory inspires in today’s Greece, many ancient Greeks were deeply hostile to both Macedonian monarchs.
But there remains a tantalising question. What was Alexander doing on a chariot, hunting with a bow while dressed as a Persian? Neither the chariot nor the bow was a ‘national’ Macedonian arm. In fact the Greek writer Plutarch records that Alexander used to occupy himself while on the march in Asia by learning chariotry and archery.
A seal-stone now in the British Museum provides a clue. A Persian work of the fifth or fourth century BC, this masterpiece of miniature art depicts Darius I of Persia (522-486 bc) hunting from a chariot, which his driver steers while the king fires arrows into a rearing lion – one of the Asian variety, now all but extinct.
Famous reliefs from Nineveh, also in the British Museum, depict the lion hunt of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC). He too hunts from a chariot with a bow and arrows. An enthusiastic audience watches from a safe distance. The lions are released from pens. The ground has been cleared like an arena. This is a carefully staged royal spectacular in which the ruler displays his manly prowess and symbolically overcomes his most dangerous enemies.
Read more - http://www.historytoday.com/tony-spawforth/alexander-cross-dressing-conqueror-world
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