 The Irish accents you hear from the Macedonian soldiers were not  there to accommodate Colin Farrell (qv) as some have asserted. As  Macedonians were mostly from more remote hill tribes and were  coarser and less civilized than the Greeks, the Celtic accents used  in the movie serve to portray fictionally the difference between  them and the more refined Greeks, such as Aristotle, played by  Christopher Plummer (qv), who speaks in a more upper class,  English accent. Many critics and audience members failed to  understand this device.