Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

The Golden Mean has been shortlisted for the 2009 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize! To see the full shortlist, please click here.

Royal Tombs

Philip II, Alexander the Great's father, was buried in the ancient city of Aegeae, near the modern village of Vergina. The tombs were discovered in 1977 by the Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos. The tombs were a rich find: amonst the many precious objects recovered there were Philip's armour, weapons, and marble sarcophogus containing a golden box, or larnax. The larnax held Philip's ashes and a wreath of three hundred and thirteen golden oak leaves and sixty-eight golden acorns.

Aegeae is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The UNESCO website asserts, in part, that "the site is of outstanding universal value representing an exceptional testimony to a significant development in European civilization, at the transition from classical city-state to the imperial structure of the Hellenistic and Roman periods". To see the website for the museum at Vergina, click here.

This short video clip offers a brief look at the remains of Aegeae and some of the artifacts discovered there, including the Philip's larnax and gold wreath.

Word of the Day

The name "Kandahar" is a corruption of "Alexander" ("Iskander" in ancient Persian). Alexander the Great founded the Afghan city in 330BCE.

I found this photo on flickr.com. It was taken just outside Kandahar, Saskatchewan.

Word on the Street

I'm very pleased to be taking part in Word on the Street this coming Sunday (September 27) at Library Square in Vancouver. I'll be in the Author's Tent at 3:00PM for a reading from The Golden Mean and an on-stage interview with Steven Galloway (The Cellist of Sarajevo, Ascension, Finnie Walsh). It's going to be a beautiful sunny day; come on down and say hi!

Giller Longlist

The Golden Mean makes the Giller longlist! To see the complete list, click here.

Montreal Gazette Review

"Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean is Historical Fiction at its Best"

"Whether posing the eternally relevant question of what it means to live a virtuous life, detailing the gory details of an ancient battle scene or probing the relationship between master and student, Lyon authoritatively evokes a fabled time and place in the urbane and dry voice of the man judged the smartest of his age."

To read Elaine Kalman Naves's full review for the Montreal Gazette, please click here.

Aristotle on Religion

"[T]here is, in Aristotle's view, no divine providence, which is so important an aspect of the Judeo-Christian view of the world. His god does not look out for, care about, and provide for man. He did not create the universe, for it is eternal, and he is utterly indifferent to it. It is true that he causes its motion, but only as a beautiful picture might cause a man to purchase it. God is the object of desire for the lesser intelligences, but he is unconscious of their admiration and would be indifferent to them if he were aware of them.

"In Aristotle's view god is a metaphysical necessity--the system requires an unmoved mover, a completely actual and fully realized form, but he is not an object of worship. Aristotle did not experience a Christian's love of a heavenly father, nor the Orphic's need for union with a mysterious, infinite power. Aristotle's god is transcendent and remote, and his attitude toward this god, at least as revealed in the Metaphysics and other works of his maturity, was emotionally neutral."

from W.T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, volume I: The Classical Mind (2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, pp.231-2)

The Bacchae

ca. 27 B.C.–14 A.D.; Augustan
Pentelic marble; H. 56 5/16 in. (143.03 cm)

Euripides, the youngest of the three great Greek tragedians (after Sophocles and Aeschylus) spent the last year of his life in Macedon as a guest of the king, Archelaus, dying there in 408 BCE. His play The Bacchae took first prize at the festival in Athens after his death.

Euripides was known for his use of strong, complex female characters. In the Poetics, Aristotle writes that Sophocles portrayed people as they ought to be but Euripides portrayed them as they were.

Performances of The Bacchae bookend The Golden Mean. It's a darkly funny, violent play that features the god Dionysus descending in human form to humiliate a priggish king for his disrespect. The god persuades the king to dress as a woman and sneak in to observe his mother and her friends engaged in Bacchic rites. The women uncover the deception but in their frenzy fail to recognize their king and rip him to pieces. His own mother carries his head home, believing she's killed a mountain lion, and only slowly recovers to realize she's dismembered her own son.

The play was a court favourite in Pella, and I open the novel with a performance of it for the royal family. Aristotle befriends the play's director, a fictional character named Carolus, who encourages the young Alexander's interest in the theatre. The novel ends (neatly, I hope!) with Philip's murder at a performance of The Bacchae , part of celebrations for his daughter's wedding.

The image above is of a dancing Maenad or Bacchante, a female follower of Dionysus (Bacchus). Notice her thyrsus, a long stick wrapped with ivy symbolizing her fidelity to the god, and her gorgeously flowing robes.

CKRY Interview

To listen to an audio interview with CKRY's Gary Freeman, please click here.

2009 Whistler Readers and Writers Festival

I'm pleased to be taking part in the opening night event of the 2009 Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, "What's the Point of all these Words?" (Friday, September 11, 7:00PM - 10:00PM, Legends Hotel at Creekside, $25) with Lee Henderson (The Man Game) and Claire Mulligan (The Reckoning of Boston Jim), hosted by CBC Radio One's Paul Grant.

Calgary Reading

I'll be reading at Pages Books in Calgary (1135 Kensington Road NW) this coming Thursday evening at 7:30PM. If you're in the area, please come by and say hi. Meanwhile, you can read my interview with Eric Volmers in the Calgary Herald here.

Whistler Writers Group Weblog

"It was exhilarating to be transported so effortlessly to a long ago place and time, peopled by vaguely familiar characters – Aristotle, Plato, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great – who now skitter about vividly in my mind’s eye."

To read the full post, click here. To see the line-up for the 2009 Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, click here.

Creating Character: Pythias

So was Aristotle really a misogynist? Since he was also a slave-owner, the question might seem trivial. But it was still a question I had to reckon with as I created the character of his wife, Pythias. We know for certain little more than her name, and that she bore him a daughter, also named Pythias. She died before her husband, who (after her death, in my imagining, though in reality who knows) took a companion named Herpyllis, who outlived him (he made provision for her in his will; more about her in a future post).

A typical woman of Pythias' time and status would have lived an exceedingly circumscribed life. She would have received no formal education, and would probably have married in her early teens. She would not have had possessions; she would not have left the house very often; she would probably have been illiterate; she would have had a good chance of dying in childbirth.

Not the happiest bundle of probabilities. As a 21st century novelist--as a 21st century woman--I wanted more for her. I thought about different ways of introducing a strong female character into the novel, but they were all cliches of one sort or another. Aristotle's wife really wrote his books! Aristotle was secretly engaged in a taboo love affair! Female academic, 2400 years later, uncovers some shocking secret about the great man!

None of these appealed to me. Partly because they've been done, sometimes wonderfully well (think of A.S. Byatt's Possession); partly because they felt dishonest. I wanted to look history in the eye and reckon with the woman as she probably was, not as I anachronistically wanted her to be. In The Golden Mean, Pythias is neither bright nor stupid, beautiful nor ugly. She wants a child but doesn't really like sex. She's literate (I made this a pet project of her husband's), but doesn't make much use of this gift. She's quiet. She has kindness in her and a bit of unexpected steel, too. She likes nice clothes. She dies too soon, in fear, and leaves behind a frightened, lonely little daughter.

Aristotle's own writings clearly rate women's intelligence beneath men's, and approves of their status as second-class citizens. I don't like the fact that he owned slaves, either; I hate it. But I couldn't bring myself to blink these things away. Fiction requires its own kind of fidelity. "Tell the truth, but tell it slant," Emily Dickinson famously wrote. For me, the operative word here is truth. Fiction is not the place for self-indulgent wish-fulfillment, even when you've got the moral high ground and the best of intentions. With Pythias, I had to choose between feeling good and feeling true. I chose true.

Westender Interview

"This bond between taciturn master and bold student is the basis of the first novel by Vancouver writer Annabel Lyon. Set in the 4th-century Macedonian capital city of Pella, and told from the great philosopher’s point of view, The Golden Mean brings Aristotle to life, free of the scholarly reverence that is so often foisted upon him."

To read Steven Schelling's full article for the Westender, please click here.

Unmentionables

Here are some of the words I realized I couldn't use while writing The Golden Mean:

velvety I used this to describe a baby's scalp before discovering that velvet was a Medieval fabric, unknown to the ancients.

rubbery To describe a person's face. Oops.

stirrups Invented by the Romans. The Greeks had saddles; the Macedonians, great horsemen, liked to ride bareback.

Caeserian This operation actually was performed by the ancient Greeks (with one shudders to guess what success), but the term was obviously of Roman origin. I had to get the incision in the right direction, too; initially I had Aristotle's father make the cut along the bikini line, as surgeons would today; but until quite recently, surgeons cut from the navel downwards, leaving a vertical rather than a horizontal scar.

And some of the words I got away with:

silk The famous silk roads, the great trading routes between Europe and Asia, were opened up by Alexander, so silk would have been all but unknown before his great campaigns. I had to change all Pythias's dresses from silk to historically accurate linen. I did allow myself to keep one metaphorical use ("the truth slipped like silk") because I just couldn't come up with a word I liked better.

tar The ancients had pine tar, particularly useful for sealing ships.

beer The Macedonians brewed barley beer, something like Medieval mead. Because the weather in mountainous Macedonia tended to be cool and rainy in the winters, grapes didn't thrive as well as in the warmer, sunnier south, and wine had to be imported.

fuck The Greeks looked on the Macedonians as vulgar barbarians, wealthy but crude, who had to import what culture they possessed. Looking for a way to distinguish in English between Greek and the Macedonian dialect, I struck on an analogous use of British and North American English. My Athenians would speak like Brits, my Macedonians like North Americans. "Do they have to curse like rappers?" an acquaintance (born in England) asked me plaintively after reading a draft. Exactly!

The 26-volume Oxford English Dictionary was an invaluable resource when anachronism became a worry. It not only provides definitions, but cites the first known use of your word, a huge bonus for the historical novelist. If anyone's wondering what to get me for Christmas....

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (Apologies to Rembrandt)

Winnipeg Free Press Review

"This historical novel adds a refreshingly human dimension to ancient Greek civilization and the world-changing ideas that it produced."

To read Ezra Glinter's full review for the Winnipeg Free Press, click here.

Georgia Straight Profile

"...a book which, remarkably, reminds us that ethical behaviour is at the heart of what it means to be human, while making us feel as close to its near-legendary subjects as we do to our own friends and neighbours."

To read Alexander Varty's profile in the Georgia Straight, please click here:

With The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon revives ancient ethics | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com

Read an Excerpt

To read a lengthy excerpt from The Golden Mean at booklounge.ca, click here.

Aquamanile: Phyllis Riding Aristotle

This aquamanile (a vessel used for ritual hand-washing) is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Dating from the southern Netherlands or eastern France, circa 1400, it depicts Aristotle allowing himself to be humiliated by Phyllis, supposedly a favourite courtesan of his student, Alexander. According to a popular morality tale from the later Middle Ages, Aristotle was teaching Alexander a lesson about the dangers of feminine wiles. I love the exquisite weirdness of this piece, and its irony. I would call it "The Misogynist Gets His Due".

Vancouver Sun Review

"...a taut, polished novel that will hold your attention from start to finish. It is at times funny, thought-provoking, sensual and suspenseful."

To read Joe Wiebe's lovely profile and review for the Vancouver Sun, please click here: The philosopher and the warrior

Reviews

“The Golden Mean is a crisply written, painstakingly researched book, and Lyon ably inhabits ‘the greatest mind of all time’...”

Read Cynthia MacDonald's full review of The Golden Mean for the Globe and Mail here.

“...an audacious attempt to create a flesh and blood Aristotle, with intimate glances into his psyche...”

Read Philip Marchand's full review for the National Post here.

“Lyon must be applauded for a daring and challenging approach to fiction.”

Read Candace Fertile's full review for the Edmonton Journal here.

Oh, Those Romans (Film and TV)

One of the biggest challenges of setting a novel in the ancient world was writing dialogue that didn't sound silly or stilted. ("Silence, by Zeus!", thundered the king.) I wanted the characters to sound like real people, not extras from Troilus and Cressida, let alone cartoons. Curious about how others had tackled this problem, I turned to movies.

One problem that came up again and again was diction: for some reason, all my characters kept trying to talk like they were British. I realized this went back to Robert Graves . I first watched the great 1976 BBC adaptation of his novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God when I was a child. Despite the English accents, the dialogue is fresh and spiky without sounding anachronistic (see clip below).

I had hopes that the recent HBO series Rome would have an even more contemporary feel. Indeed, despite (again!) the English accents, the characters felt immediate and recognizable, people you could talk to rather than just listen to.

Finally, for a bit of cinematic ancient Greece, find Pier Paolo Pasolini's astonishing 1967 movie Oedipus Rex. Pasolini has claimed that the film was autobiographical. An intense, beautiful, strange journey through a landscape that's both dream-like and utterly credible.

Here's a clip of one of my favourite I, Claudius characters, the empress Livia, instructing her gladiators:

Martha the Great

I first read Martha Nussbaum as an undergraduate philosophy student at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy examines the ethical thought of Plato and Aristotle, but also Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as manifested in their tragic dramas. When I read this book, a lot of vague and unsettled ideas I'd been struggling toward fell into place with one of those profoundly satisfying clicks you hope to experience once or twice in your intellectual life. I realized my interests in fiction and philosophy were not mutually exclusive. Not only could they co-exist, they might in fact be different facets of the same interest, two itches that could be scratched with the same finger.

Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature continues her project of mining literary works for ethical and philosophical insights. It includes essays on Aristotle, Plato, Henry James, Charles Dickens, and Samuel Beckett. She's also written books on education, religion, economics, and law.

Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.