In Alexander the Great, Angelopoulos turns an incident from 19th-century Greek history into a fable of absolute power corrupting a village. The film contrasts imperialist notions of Greece as Byronically Romantic with the brutal reality of primitive conditions and massacres. Here, Alexander is a tribal warlord and former political prisoner who kidnaps British tourists, holding them for ransom until Britain and the Greek puppet government in Athens meet his demand for amnesty for his band of freedom fighters. Angelopoulos asks viewers to see the ruins of Greece not so much as the remnants of a noble past but as the evidence of ongoing pillage. More crazily leftist than the previous three history films, the film marks a break between his historical reconstructions and the “trilogy of silence” that followed.