Classical genius: a novel take on Aristotle and his years with Alexander the Great.

Robinson, Thomas M.

The Golden Mean

Annabel Lyon

Random House Canada

287 pages, hardcover

ISBN 9780307356208

ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING SNIPPETS of information we have about classical antiquity is that one of the world's greatest philosophers, Aristotle, spent a few years of his life tutoring a teenage boy who would become one of the world's greatest military leaders, Alexander the Great. Beyond that, we are almost entirely in the dark as to how the two related, what Aristotle attempted to teach, the manner in which he taught, what if anything Alexander finished up learning (or, for that matter, what Aristotle might have learned from Alexander).

It is a rich vein of ore for various types of fiction to mine. The last novel to do so in detail, Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, appeared 50 years ago, and it looked at the matter from the perspective of Alexander. In her first full-length novel, The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon has Aristotle tell us the tale. And her characters certainly hold our attention.

Lyon's Aristotle suffers from what might be described in contemporary terms as bipolar disorder, his moods ranging from manic, self-confident periods of activity (intellectual and sexual) to Stygian gloom, with the gloom predominating. It takes little to get him crying, occasionally from joy but more often than not from depression. He has been a loner since childhood, and has devoted his life to learning, especially about the world of biology. Nothing is considered odd, still less out of bounds, as a source of information; in fact, the novel begins with an account of an episode in his careful, ongoing study of his wife Pythias's vagina as material for a book he is writing on sexual generation.

As a component of the world of biology, he is himself of course an object of observation, and what he concludes is that he is in a state of "illness," a state that leads him at one point to call himself "garbage." In the more formal terms of his own philosophical beliefs, he sees himself as a person of extremes, and as such a good example of that need for the "mean" state that will feature as a prominent topic in his later writings on ethics. None of this stops him from living a life of extremes, ranging from a never-ceasing cultivation of the intellect (which leads him at one point to describe himself as "good, steady, studious, boring me") to a memorable episode of vigorous rutting, over a three-year span in his teen years, with a girl who does not even manage to acquire a name. His is a world of "sex and books," as he sums it up. He is also a calm procurer of young boys for his first teacher, Illaeus (a non-historical figure), and his conversational language ranges from the sublime to the scatological with apparent great ease.

While this picture of Aristotle might surprise a few people, Lyon's portrait of Alexander will probably not, since there is some evidence to show that he was indeed subject to mood swings that made him unpredictable, dangerous and cruel; and it is a stroke of great imagination on the part of the author to think that a shared tendency toward bipolar mood swings might have made them attracted to each other as teacher and pupil. It is a relationship that is both tension filled and loving, as two people--both, in their own ways, geniuses--struggle to ensure that what each holds dear survives and is taken seriously by the other: Aristotle his commitment to virtue and the good, Alexander his commitment to winning, and especially winning in warfare.

The story of the few years Aristotle spent tutoring Alexander is written within the broad framework of what we know of the history of that period, but it is Lyon's own inventions that often produce her most alluring writing. The wine-and-sex-sodden Illaeus (a former, failed pupil of Plato) is memorable as Aristotle's own first tutor, as is the theatre director Carolus, whose heroic attempts to finesse a group of local amateurs into producing a decent performance of Euripides' Bacchae serve as a slightly macabre comic background for a short book on artistic creation that Aristotle is starting to put together. The slave Athea, whom he buys for his wife Pythias, is also a delight, and is used with great humour as a device for our understanding of how Pythias finally got pregnant.

Lyon can also be imaginative in composing supposed connections in episodes in the lives of historical figures. As Aristotle watches Pythias dying, for example, he cannot cease from the life of the mind, and her laboured breathing becomes material for a little book on respiration he is working on. On an earlier occasion in his life, on a supposed visit with his doctor-father to a young woman undergoing a perilous childbirth, he realizes that a possible reason why his father fails to save the woman's life is the absurdity of the current medical practice that allowed vivisection when called for (in this case, the baby's life is saved by Caesarean section) but looked with horror on that dissection of corpses that might have provided his father with information about female anatomy that might have helped him save the mother's life; and at a stroke we are looking at a remarkable fictive reason why, from very early on in his life, Aristotle might have been interested in dissection as a potential source of information about the world.

On one occasion an interesting idea may be based on a false lead. The relationship between Aristotle and Alexander the author fashions into one of (metaphorical) father and son, with Aristotle frequently addressing him as child. It is a novelist's privilege to imagine such things, of course, but the word "child" still sounds a little strange to my ears, and I wonder if it is not based on a less than compelling extrapolation from one of our sources. In his Life of Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius tells us how Aristotle had learned that his nephew Callisthenes had been speaking too freely to Alexander, and how he had quoted to him two lines from Homer's Iliad, in which Thetis, mother of Achilles, had warned him of the dangers attaching to hasty speech:

"Alas, my child, in life's primeval gloom, Such hasty words will bring thee to thy doom."

If Diogenes Laertius is accurate in his account, we are, to the best of my knowledge, looking here at the single, clear instance of the use, in a sentence written or uttered by Aristotle, of the word "child" to refer to someone who is clearly well beyond the stage of childhood. But all Aristotle is doing is quoting Homer, in a passage where the situation is one of a mother talking to her son. There is nothing to suggest that he might have thought it appropriate for him to use such language as a teacher addressing a pupil.

While the novel is engagingly written, and rich in imagination, I must also express a qualm about the easygoing obscenity that colours much of the dialogue in it, including some of Aristotle's. While we can never know for certain how educated Greeks of the classical age might have spoken in day-to-day conversation, I find it hard to believe, given his home environment, background in Plato's academy and philosophical writings, that Aristotle would have spoken with apparent ease, when it suited him, in the manner of Athenians he would have occasionally encountered down at the port of the Piraeus. For me, a richly inventive book could have stood very comfortably on its own without this overlay to his discourse.

Thomas M. Robinson is professor emeritus of philosophy and classics at the University of Toronto. In 1998 he was a recipient of the Aristotle Award.