I'm currently reading a historical fiction novel about him, and he's described as fair skinned with curly blond hair. However, I've read online that this is false, and that he was brown skinned, as in Arab looking, and some other saying that he was even potentially black. I have no idea which to give most credit, so was wondering if some of you erudite folks here could enlighten me?
Thanks so much!
I'm honestly not sure why it matters, but here's what little we know:
Biographical sources claim that Alexander was not dark-skinned. Plutarch (Life of Alexander 4.2) complained that the painter Apelles (whose work is lost) made him too swarthy-looking, saying that he was actually 'white' (λευκός), even 'ruddy' (λευκότης ἐπεφοίνισσεν) in his face and chest. It is possible that this reflects a Thracian strand in his ancestry, since the ancient Thracians were known to have some blondes and red-haired people among them. Other late authors claim that he had one blue eye and one black.
Our only depiction of Alexander the Great in colour, though, tells a different story. This is the famous Alexander Mosaic found at Pompeii, which is probably a copy of a painting made in the late 4th century BC in the Levant (and therefore probably the closest to Alexander of any source we have on him). On the mosaic, Alexander is clearly shown with brown curly hair, dark eyes and tanned skin - more like a typical Mediterranean.
The trouble with our sources on Alexander is that they are all very late. They were written in a world in which Alexander was already 'the Great', a conqueror of incredible success, who had toppled the mightiest empire the world had ever seen. Needless to say, the man was heavily romanticised after his death. We should assume that his physical description in Plutarch was intended to make him sound exotic, even superhuman. After his talk about Alexander's whiteness, Plutarch goes on to claim that Alexander's body constantly exuded a lovely smell. The mismatched eyes mentioned by Arrian also fit this pattern, and have obvious symbolic meaning - reflecting the way Alexander's life merged glory and infamy, brilliance and excess, and dominion over Europe and Asia. Whatever these authors say about him, we can't simply take at face value; all surviving sources were written hundreds of years after his death, and none of their authors had actually seen him.
Given the sources' tendency towards glorification and distortion, the safest option would be to default on the appearance of a typical person from the ancient southern Balkans - which is what the Alexander mosaic confirms. Even if we accept Plutarch and Arrian, though, it is certain that no source describes Alexander as either blonde-haired or black of skin.
There is a mosaic of Alexander in Pompeii from 101 BC which depicts Alexander having Black hair and bronze skin. There is not much evidence that he was "black" but there is evidence that he was born white, because his parents were and also back then the dark skinned people of Africa rarely made trips to Macedonia.
