The name "Roxanne" (which means "luminous beauty") has been owned by a great many important female historical figures.
Deep ThoughtGreat Roxannes in world history include the wife of Alexander the Great and the love interest in the play about Cyrano de Bergerac, a brash poet in the French army with a huge nose. Sting, lead singer of the Police, wanted to write a song about a prostitute in the Paris Red Light District and gave her the name Roxanne because he saw an old poster for the play Cyrano de Bergerac hanging in his French hotel lobby.
During his enormously successful and famous conquest of the ancient world, Alexander the Great stopped in Bactria (present day Uzbekistan and Northern Afghanistan) in order to take over the rest of the Persian Empire. His troops surprise-attacked the Persians in Balkh at the Sogdian Rock Fortress, and they quickly surrendered.
Victorious Alexander attended a Sogdian wedding soon afterward and was totally smitten with one of the female dancers, a fifteen-year-old girl named Roxana. Against the advice of his fellow Macedonians (she was a barbarian, after all) he married her and she followed him through the rest of his journey. She was not his only wife. Later, Alexander took another woman named Sateira as his bride and was also rumored to have had a long-lasting romantic relationship with his closest friend and fellow soldier, Hephaestion. Roxana bore his only child, Alexander IV Aegus, who was his sole heir and the successor to his kingdom after Alexander died of a fever/alcohol poisoning/spinal deformities—nobody really knows how—at the age of 33. Roxana and her son were later assassinated by Cassander in his quest to succeed to the throne of Alexander's empire. People got away with that kind of stuff back then.
Now, back to Cyrano de Bergerac. He lived many years after Alexander, during the early to mid-1600s, and was a French playwright and swordsman. Most major historical figures are famous for their heroic deeds, but Cyrano was probably best remembered for his ridiculously large nose. That thing was big, and more interesting than his actual life were the many stories written about him and his shnoz, including the famous play in his name by Edmund Rostand.
The historical Cyrano de Bergerac was a soldier, a writer, drinker, and gambler, and known for his outrageous courage when it came to dueling. He was proud of his prominent, bulbous nose, but his fictional character hid it with deep insecurity. Many scholars think that the real Bergerac was gay, based on his relationship with another prominent nobleman (yet another link to Alexander the Great), but Rostand crafted his play on the idea that Cyrano was in love with his distant cousin, the beautiful—you guessed it—Roxanne.
Another interesting connection between the play Cyrano de Bergerac and Alexander the Great, besides the name Roxanne, is that the play was written almost entirely in Alexandrine verse, a style that was thought to have arisen in French-written heroic epics describing the exploits of Alexander the Great. While Shakespeare liked to write in iambic pentameter (ten-syllable lines that follow an unstressed-stressed pattern), many French poets and dramatists displayed Alexandrine verse instead. It's a 12-syllable line of six iambic unstressed/stressed iambic "feet" with a caesura, or pause, in the middle.
Album IntroLyricsAlbum listSinger Intro
The Police( Sting & Police )Roxanne
Lyrics:Sting
Music:Sting
Roxanne, you don't have to put on the red light
Those days are over
You don't have to sell your body to the night
Roxanne, you don't have to wear that dress tonight
Walk the streets for money
You don't care if it's wrong or if it's right
Roxanne, you don't have to put on the red light
Roxanne, you don't have to put on the red light
Put on the red light, put on the red light
Put on the red light, put on the red light
Put on the red light, oh
Find more lyrics at ※ Mojim.com
I loved you since I knew ya
I wouldn't talk down to ya
I have to tell you just how I feel
I won't share you with another boy
I know my mind is made up
So put away your make up
Told you once I won't tell you again it's a bad way
Roxanne, you don't have to put on the red light
Roxanne, you don't have to put on the red light
You don't have to put on the red light
Put on the red light, put on the red light
Mojim Lyrics
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