Hello Dr. Reames, quick question, according to Wikipedia, it says that the traces of paint left on the Istanbul sarcophagus "indicates that he was depicted with brown eyes an chestnut brown hair" how true is that? I believe you mentioned here that that same polychromy's red base paint for golden hues suggests he was strawberry blonde? And what of his eye color then? Should the sarcophagus (but really Wikipedia) be trusted if it says he had brown eyes? Any helpful resources would be greatly appreciated.
What Color Were Alexander’s Eyes and Hair?
Combining with another ask…
Hello Dr. Reames! Quick question, I got into an argument with someone online that accused me of trying to "Nordicize" Alexander when I posted my fanart of him from Dancing with the Lion (i.e. strawberry blond with blue eyes) but I'm just curious, how do we know that for certain? I mean, doesn't the hunt fresco from tomb II at Vergina in northern Greece portray Alexander with brown eyes and hair? And doesn't the Alexander sarcophagus portray him as having brown eyes along with his red-brown hair, or do you think the brown eyes is a base paint maybe? Anyway, I'd love to hear from you! You're just as great as Mary Beard!
For some reason, this is a wildly popular question. LOL
I’m doing both these queries at once, as they came in almost back-to-back and are closely related.
And thanks for the compliment, re: Mary Beard. 😊 That’s high praise indeed.
So, I took a look at Wikipedia to see what the footnotes (if any) said, wondering where that information originally came from: an exhibit called Gods in Color. Fortunately for me, the person scanned the page from the exhibition catalogue and made it available. The Wikipedia author also notes the Akropolis Head (from Athens) had a yellow-y base coat for his hair. The newer reconstruction of the frieze on Tomb II does indeed show Alexander's hair as a medium brown, although it’s a reconstruction of a badly deteriorated painting. That said, the techniques they used to pull out the colors are really super-cool, so it could be entirely accurate.
I want to note four things before digging in.
First, there’s been a shift lately in answers to this question. Once, Alexander was popularly considered blond/blue-eyed with arguments to the contrary dismissed. These days, perhaps in a deliberate kick back at “Nordicism,” the reverse is true (as the second asker found). He had brown hair and eyes because…Mediterranean! I’ve also increasingly heard it from Greeks who want him to look more like modern Greeks, ignoring the fact Greece has been a crossroads of cultures and peoples since the Bronze Age.
While without question modern Greeks are DNA-linked to ancient Greeks, there's also been an in-flow of various other ethnicities, depending on where. The islands [and which islands!] are different from the north (and northeast and northwest differ!). Cyprus is its own puzzle, as is Crete. Even the Peloponnese and the mainland are different.
So, in short, we can’t necessarily expect Alexander to match the coloring of modern Greeks. The various pebble mosaics from Pella would suggest otherwise. Several of these figures, not just Alexander, are dirty-blond/redheads. This is not just digital or screen settings; I’ve seen these mosaics in person.
Is that reddish color simply the pebbles fading? Or the “color palette” of the artist? Possibly, as the hair color of the figures in each mosaic matches. Yet there are brown pebbles in the mosaics, so it would've been perfectly possible to give these figures matching brown hair instead of matching reddish-blond. We have paintings from Macedonian tombs where we find both lighter- and darker-haired people. Then there are the nicknames. Kleitos Melas (the Black) and a Kleitos Leukos (the White). With our modern obsession with skin-color, I’ve seen people occasionally mistake this to indicate Kleitos Melas was a Black man. No, he had dark hair (melas = dark). Kleitos Leukos (leukos = light) was blond/light-haired.
Second, we in the modern world have a bit of an obsession with eye and hair color. The ancients… didn’t. This is why, for instance, Plutarch’s rather extensive description of Alexander’s appearance (Alex. 4) doesn’t give us anything about his hair or eye color. The most we get is that his complexion was “ruddy-fair,” leaning more to ruddy on the chest.
Furthermore, ancient Greek had fewer words for colors. The term used for blue eyes can also indicate gray or green. And we have a translation problem. “Gray-eyed” Athena is modern. Greek says γλαυκῶπις (glaukōpis) which means BRIGHT, not gray. E.g., her eyes seem to catch the light and flash. Yes, pale gray eyes do that, but so do pale blue or pale green. It’s really denoting her ability to perceive: a characteristic associated with, oh, I don’t know, wisdom. 😉
The Greeks seemed more concerned with levels of brightness than color. We find this frequently in their poetry. So, a “wine-dark” sea doesn’t mean the sea is red (or their wine was blue… yes, some have seriously tried to propose that). It means the sea is DARK, obscuring, like wine in a cup.
They just don’t seem to care as much about the color of things, but with shade, brightness, and tint. So rather than have fine(r) distinctions for colors: baby blue, royal blue, navy blue, etc. They talk about darkness and lightness for an entire HUE, or color family. That’s really what their “color” terms are. Interesting, no?
Third, we have two chief specialists on Alexander’s image. First, Andrew Stewart, who wrote Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics (1993), for the Anglophones, and who the Wiki article mentions. Then Paolo Moreno, who wrote Alessandro Magno: Immagini come Storia (2004), for the Italian-speakers. Both are simply MASSIVE books, with lots of plates. If you are serious about Alexander’s image, read them. The two don’t always agree, but both are just hugely respected art historians and archaeologists. Both books are pricey due to the image plates, so perhaps get friendly with this thing called “interlibrary loan,” if you’re not already familiar.
Stewart describes Alexander’s physical appearance in several places, but most notably p. 72ff, where he discusses three ancient traditions. He says, “modern investigators habitually conflate these three traditions, or (worse) select only those elements from them that fit their own preconceptions.” These three are: 1) contemporary observations, 2) Aristotelian physiognomic analysis, and 3) later (imperial era) the idealizing “paradigm of the romantically handsome prince,” and he names Arrian, Appian, and Apuleius as the chief perpetuators (73). The Blenheim Alexander, originally from Herculaneum, shows it.
Stewart summarizes his appearance, and I’ll quote him at length, as it’s useful:
Taken together, the two early traditions are not particularly flattering. Alexander was neither tall nor tanned; his neck apparently drooped and was twisted slightly towards his left shoulder, and he held his head high, tending to look upwards; he was clean-shaven; he had a loud, harsh voice; his eyes were limpid and melting; his brow was fierce; his hair formed a cowlick (anastolē) above it; and there was something altogether scary in his countenance. This is very far from the romantic crusader of the Roman imperial writers, the nineteenth-century biographers, and their latter-day followers such as Mary Renault: closer to the aptly named Alex of A Clockwork Orange or even to Sid Vicious than to a Prince Valiant! Only Lysippos was able to render these quirks (voice excluded) without diminishing Alexander’s kingly aretē—his virile and leonine nature. Lysippos’s task was not easy, for although a head held high and a loud voice were unmistakable signs of strutting masculinity, white skin, melting eyes, a smooth chin, and a drooping neck signaled exactly the opposite. Whatever this strange and somewhat uncanny fusion of masculine and feminine many have contributed to his electrifying charisma, it certainly fascinated and perplexed his contemporaries—his court artists in particular. (73-74, I suggest finding and reading this entire section, as it tells a lot about ancient assumptions, as well as Alexander’s possible goals with regard to his youthful appearance. Stewart adds, later….) To Alexander, the sarcasms of the Greeks were of no great importance. It was Macedonian opinion that counted, and in Macedon, the ancient traditions of heroic kingship were thriving still. (75)
All this is also why, in the novels, I have Hephaistion observe that only a flatterer would call Alexandros handsome. LOL
But also notice, in all the ancient hoopla about Alexander’s appearance… nary a mention of his hair or eye color.
Both Stewart and Moreno discuss the sarcophagus (Stewart, 294-306; Moreno, 227-32), but don’t really discuss eye- or hair-color there. There's also a Wikipedia article on the sarcophagus itself, which delves into the dispute over who it was FOR (Abdalonymos—bulk of scholars, Mazaeus—Heckel). And if I am not always a fan of Wikipedia, I thought this entry was better than average.
Fourth, when it comes to ancient statues, what we’re usually able to determine is the under- or base coat. (The second asker alludes to this, in fact.) When you see an ancient sculpture recolored, such as was done for the Alexander sarcophagus (images below), they tend to look a bit glaring—as if meant for a children’s display. I suspect this is (one) reason some fight so hard against the (absolutely proven) fact these statues weren’t white. Yes, racism is some of it, but TBH, the first time I saw one of these re-colorings, my reaction was “Eeew!” So, if one grew up on their beauty in white marble, seeing them painted can be a turn-off.
BUT that’s not what they actually looked like, any more than pure white is.
If we consider ancient Greek painting (mostly preserved today in tomb frescos), we see the Greeks had a fine sense of shading and tint. (Below, the Rape of Persephone from Royal Tomb I at Vergina.) THAT is what their sculptures would have looked like! Not Adventures with a Color Wheel for Kindergartners. It’s just that all we can really recover for sure is the base color that seeped into the marble/stone. Of course, the painter would then have finished it far more lifelike. (Note also that the figures here have reddish hair too, but as they're gods, I'm not taking it as indicative of Macedonians, and the paint has faded; the original was probably lighter brown.)
Now, finally getting to the question about the Alexander Sarcophagus….
We have a blessing of a sort: descriptions of the sculptures when the tomb was first opened, before fresh air got in there and oxidized the paint. His hair was described as reddish. I don’t recall that description specifying chestnut (which I think of as medium brown). Anyway, I found it quite plausible, as that matches Plutarch’s “ruddy-fair” complexion. (This recounting of the opening might come from Olga Palagia but I don't rightly remember.) Incidentally, while they had photography then (1887), it was still very much black-and-white. ☹
With redheads, eye color varies, but brown eyes are, in fact, more common. So Alexander very well could have had brown eyes and still been a ginger (or auburn). I chose to make his eyes blue in the novels simply because I wanted to play with the (very late and almost certainly invented) heterochromic eye-color tradition, but in a new way, giving him one expanded pupil. That would be more dramatic if his eyes were blue. Yet I don’t consider it at all implausible that his eyes were brown.
Now, here’s another potential fly in the ointment. Is the (Greek) figure on horseback on the lion-hunt long side of the sarcophagus actually Alexander? Alternative identities have been proposed (depending on when this hunt supposedly took place).
Also, to muddle the waters even further, identification of whom the sarcophagus belonged to has been questioned—although tbh, I think the arguments for Abdalonymos are sounder than Heckel’s suggestion of Mardonius. But back to the hunt. If the tomb were Abdalonymos’s, the Greek man riding to his rescue could also have been Perdikkas, or even Demetrios Poliorketes (Antigonos’s son). Alternatively, people have proposed Hephaistion, as the face isn’t particularly individuated in quite the same way as the lion-helmed rider on the battle side. If the figure on the pediment of one side, being executed by other Macedonian soldiers, is Perdikkas—which I find quite likely—his hair is also reddish.
So in short, if that’s Demetrios or Perdikkas, and not Alexander, the hair color (and eye-color) is a red herring. Alas, we can’t see (much of) Alexander’s hair under the lion-head helmet. Also, red can sometimes be a base color for brown--as with those eyes. No, he's not a vampire. Several figures on the sarcophagus have "red" eyes, both Persians and Greeks.
That brings us back around to the Pella mosaics, where in at least one, Alexander’s identity is about 98% certain: the Lion Hunt Mosaic from the House of Dionysos—a local copy of the famous bronze group commissioned by Krateros’s son (also a Krateros) for Delphi. Such copies in other mediums weren’t uncommon. The mosaic, however, has only the two chief figures: Alexander and Krateros. Both are what I’d call reddish/dark blond/light brown haired.
The Stag Hunt Mosaic (from the House of the Rape of Persephone) also has sometimes been identified as Alexander (and Hephaistion), but there’s not, imo, a good reason for that aside from the petasos flying off the head of the Alexander figure, linked by some to the petasos-sporting Alexander in the Lion Hunt Mosaic. Yet these mosaics are not from the same house, nor (probably) by the same artist. Look closely. The style doesn’t appear the same to me, even if the colors are similar. And the petasos was a rather common sunhat type—although not one as popular in Macedonia. (That was the kausia.)
Moreno wants to identify the stag-hunt figures as Alexander and Hephaistion, and then uses the axe wielded by a Page on the lion-hunt frieze from Royal Tomb II (above) to name that Page Hephaistion. But I am just not comfortable with that extrapolation. Back to my tendency to be rather conservative when it comes to identifying figures in artwork. If I don’t have a pretty good reason to name a particular figure so-and-so, I'll be cagey about it. I do think the lion hunt depicts Alexander and Krateros. Otherwise…not so fast.
Also, using the double-headed axe (labrys) as some identifier for Hephaistion because it was sacred to Hephaistos (the god) raises two problems. First, it's not sacred to Hephaistos. The HAMMER (and tongs) are. Second, worship of Hephaistos was virtually absent from Macedonia (Samothrace excepted). The figures in the stag hunt and lion hunt are clearly carrying an axe, not a hammer. If you want a god with a labrys outside of Hittite areas or Minoan Crete—one closer to Macedonia—that’ll be the Thracian-Getai-Dacian god Zalmoxis, who is usually conflated with Zeus, Hades, or even Pythagoros—not Hephaistos. Image below even shows him using it in a hunt! Given that logic, we might name the youth with the double axe a royal Thracian at the court! (Yes, they were there.)
But in any case, when you look at the coloring of these people in the mosaics…they’re on the fairer side. Maybe that’s to create a sense of artistic cohesion via color (as noted before), but compared to the hair color we see in polychromy on statues and art from, say, Athens—where a lot is brown/dark brown—I don’t think they’d pick reddish/dirty blond if it were something the people commissioning the art found atypical. In other tombs including Royal Tomb II, we do see brown and dark brown hair, but also fair. In the top frieze below from Agaios Athenasios tomb, most of the figures wear a kausia (Macedonian hat) or helmets, but the two at the end are bare-headed. The final figure has brown hair, but the figure just before him looks like a dark blond.
We are looking here at contemporary representations of actual Macedonians, not heroes or gods. And at least some of them are on the fairer side.
Yes, some folks like to point to the Pompeii mosaic, or the painting of Alexander from the House of the Golden Bracelet as proof that Alexander was dark. Problem: both date to the first century CE (or at most BCE, for the mosaic), and are Romanized in some ways (including the damn sideburns, which we don’t find until the Hellenistic era or later). That includes coloring.
Plutarch even complains about Apelles’ paintings (in Alexander's own day!) for getting Alexander’s coloring “too dark.” So while the mosaic may be remarkably accurate in the way of clothing and armor, I wouldn’t use it for Alexander’s coloring.
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(A final note: I once had somebody who’d seen a photo of me accuse me of insisting Alexander had blond hair because I’m blonde. Folks, that isn’t blonde hair, that’s GRAY. My hair in my youth was just one tick up from black; my mother had true (native) black hair. I’m not arguing Alexander was a ginger or dark blond because that’s my hair color. I’m not that narcissistic.)
