The Golden Mean

The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon is a historical novel about the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander the Great. Aristotle was a tutor to the young Alexander, a position conferred by his reputation for wisdom and his friendship with Philip, Alexander’s father. Lyon does a wonderful job placing the reader immediately within the landscape — political, social, and natural — in which these renowned names from history circulated. Even better, she brings them out of the realm of renown and into a state of contemporary humanity. The boys, men, and women of The Golden Mean are by no means modern and yet their concerns and their desires are both recognizable and understandable. In fact, at times these characters seemed more real to me than some of the current icons of society. I feel an affinity to Aristotle than I could never claim to The Situation.

The tension between the world of the mind (Aristotle’s existence) and the world of the body (Philip’s realm) is a steady theme in Lyon’s novel, and a unifying element of the story lines she develops, including Aristotle’s marriage to Pythias and his later liaison with a servant; his tutoring of Alexander as well as of Alexander’s mentally disabled brother Arrhidaeus; and Alexander’s shifting behaviors both on the battle field and in his relationships with peers.
The underlying struggle for all of Lyon’s characters is the question of how to live a good life. For Alexander, the tension between Aristotle’s example of careful thought and study contrasts sharply with his mother Octavia’s obsessive and dangerous passions of advancement and power. Philip’s hopes for his son, tempered by fear and misunderstanding of Alexander’s motivations, are both a shackle on the young Alexander and a spur to action. Aristotle instructs Alexander to find the balance between the many influences in his life, and to define the virtuous path by negotiating between the extremes. This is Aristotle’s Golden Mean, where virtue is determined by the center ground between opposing vices. Courage, for example, is the virtue between cowardice and recklessness.
In Lyon’s hands, Aristotle is bi-polar, swinging between periods of happiness and productivity and periods of depression and inactivity. Her Alexander is also set on a course of extremes, both physical and mental. Perhaps the most balanced life — satisfying, pleasurable, and productive — does come from following the Golden Mean. But Lyons’ novels poses the question of whether greatness arises from living at the extreme edges of behavior. Aristotle went back and forth in a bi-polar cycle of frenzy and inertia, and is recognized as the father of Western Philosophy. So did Alexander become The Great through his extremes of physical and mental states, or in spite of them? Lyons’ captivating novel, The Golden Mean, will start readers on their way to debate and discuss, and enjoy, the lessons of Aristotle and Alexander.