The Golden Mean

by Annabel Lyon

  “Yes. I wondered.”

  “Only you should be more careful.” Ptolemy glances at the pages, then meets my eyes again with his straight, cool, frank look, sympathetic, though with no purchase for friendship in it. “No one wants to hear about the glories of Athens right now. We are at war.”

  “Am I to fear boys, then?”

  “Boys,” Ptolemy says. “Boys, their fathers.”

  “What do you hear from the army?” Philip is on campaign again. Thermopylae was supposed to hold him back, as it had so many invaders in the past, but the Athenians and the Thebans between them forgot to reinforce the back roads, and Philip simply took the long way round. He has recently taken the city of Elateia, two or three days’ march from Attica and Athens.

  “Diplomatic overtures to Thebes,” Ptolemy says. “Join us against Athens, or at least stay neutral and let us pass through your territory without trouble. Though I hear Demosthenes himself is in Thebes, waiting to deliver the Athenian pitch.”

  “You hear a lot.”

  “I do.”

  “I’m surprised you’re not with them.”

  “Antipater asked me to stay here.”

  We watch the fight.

  “He’s feeling much better,” Ptolemy says.

  I thank him for the information.

  At home I’m met by Tycho, who tells me Pythias has given birth to a daughter. I find her asleep in clean sheets with her hair dressed, and the baby already bathed and swaddled, sleeping in a basket beside her. Athea is in the kitchen kneading bread, thank you, as though this were the day’s real work that she’s had to interrupt to deliver a baby.

  “Easy,” she says before I can speak. “Long time but no problems. Always first is long time. Next is easier. My lady—”

  She struggles for the words. I wonder when Pythias became her lady instead of my wife, when that affection set in.

  “Resting?” I suggest.

  She raps a knuckle on a cooking pot. “Iron.” Satisfied, she turns back to her doughs.

  “Thank you.”

  “Next time easier.” She doesn’t bother to look over her shoulder at me. “Maybe I even let you watch.”

  A week after the birth, I carry the baby around the altar Pythias has lit, purifying her. We’ve hung wool from the doors to show the world it’s a girl, and prepared a feast, overseen by Athea, to celebrate her life so far. Athea is fiercely possessive of the creature, to the point where I’ve seen her take the baby from Pythias’s arms and make Pythias cry, but I don’t intervene. After ten days we prepare another feast, inviting some friends this time, for the name-day. Callisthenes brings rattles for my daughter and pretty painted vases for Pythias, as is the tradition, while Athea watches us all blackly, muttering to herself, her face softening only when she looks at the baby.

  Little Pythias has a boxer’s crease across the bridge of her nose and looks at me with a gaze the slaves say is preternaturally calm and steady, and foretells great wisdom. Other auguries: a white bee in the rosemary, a flight of swallows across the moon at dusk, unseasonable warmth and a sweet-smelling breeze at midnight, a pepper of sparks from a kitchen fire that had supposedly been extinguished. The household collects these happenings and trades them like rare coins. These and other wondrous events continue for weeks, reaching a fever pitch when we all are at our most sleep-deprived. I understand that every household with a new baby goes as foolish fond, and I collect more quietly, and keep to myself, my own talismans: the spider’s thread of milk from wife’s breast to daughter’s lip when they draw apart after a feeding; the abrupt drop of the baby’s brows when something amuses her; the way, at times of greatest distress, she buries her entire face in her mother’s breast, as though seeking oblivion there. Liberty and self-sufficiency: the house is like a ship, Pythias and I and the servants like mariners, united by the determination to protect our tiny, mewling freight. Tycho lines a handcart with pillows and clean woollens and clatters the baby up and down the courtyard while the servants clap their hands in time and cry, bump, bump! for her greater amusement. She smiles pacifically, with an infant’s mild aristocracy. Everything, everyone, it all belongs to her. When she mouths her first bites of honey pap, the slaves meet my eye, smile, and congratulate me. I realize they don’t often look me in the eye.

  Pythias I had worried for, not knowing if she would rise to motherhood or be sunk by it; her cold elegance and alien distance didn’t bode well. But her breasts went plump with milk, and she sat on the floor, even in her linens, to fuss and coo at the baby. She weeps with exhaustion, from time to time, and both she and the baby fret when anyone—from myself to Tycho—leaves the house for too long. Liberty we have none, but there is self-sufficiency in our pleasure in the child and each other. Everyone, myself included, seems to touch more, as though the urge to touch the baby, to finger the downy depth of her scalp or the delectable fat toes, has transferred to one another. I myself, though she’s only a girl, undertake to supervise her education, which must begin, I tell anyone who will listen, as early as possible. In the ideal state, the education of children will be the highest business of government.

  “Oh, the ideal state,” Pythias says. “I suppose she will need to know how to read, in the ideal state?” For she has caught me reciting the alpha-beta-gamma to the baby, who watches me wide-eyed from her bassinet of woven reeds, working her fists open and closed.

  “I work with the materials I’m given.”

  “I suppose, in your ideal state, she will be a citizen?”

  I explain why that is ridiculous. The hierarchy of the state mimics that of the household, where men lead and women and slaves obey, as nature has fitted them to do.

  THEBES VOTED TO GO WITH ATHENS, initiating a rare winter campaign. Philip, in an unusual tactical error, didn’t rush south to take the pass, but hung back thinking he might still politic a resolution. The Athenians raced north to seize the pass and for some months the opposing armies are locked in position, making small feints at each other with no real engagement. When spring comes, Philip falls back on the oldest trick in the book: he allows a false letter to fall into Athenian hands suggesting he’s giving up and going home. He even backs his army up a little, only to turn in the night and ram the pass, where the Athenians have let their defences down. Philip takes the pass and the city, and the stalemate is ended.

  Pythias has been distracted lately, frowning, and asks me to write a brief life of Hermias for a keepsake, which I do one morning in the courtyard while my fat daughter sits on the sun-warmed stones, babbling and staring at her fingers. I haven’t permitted her to be swaddled, believing it inhibits the development of the muscles. And here she is, a healthy baby, pink and blooming; Hermias’s own blood, perhaps, babbling prettily in the sun. I think the old fox would have been moved despite himself.

  “It’s lovely,” Pythias says.

  “I was thinking of our Little Pythias as I wrote it.”

  She thanks me again, then frowns and puts a hand to her side. A moment later I’m calling for the slaves, supporting her in my arms. She has to be carried to her bed, where she lies in great pain for several days.

  “What is?” Athea asks me. She’s stopped me in the hall outside our bedroom. Asks; demands, truly. She doesn’t look happy.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I look. Is no baby again.”

  “She is not pregnant, no.”

  “I’m tell you,” she says, annoyed. “Is sickness.”

  “She is a little warm. Apart from the pain in the belly, there is some paleness, a bit of sweating. Cool cloths, I think, and a light diet. Clear liquids. We will wait a few days and watch how it progresses.” I have begun a case study, as my father would have; my first since boyhood. I’m not happy, either.

  “I tell women,” Athea says.

  I’m not sure I understand; I wonder if it is the chasm between our languages, if something is getting lost there. “You are her woman,” I say, slowly, loudly. “I am instructing you in her care
. You are skilled in these things, more than the others; you will follow my instructions and report to me if there is any change.”

  “No,” Athea says. “I tell women. I no do with sick.”

  For a moment I have no words. Then: “What are you talking about?”

  “I no do with sick.” She crosses her arms across her breast for emphasis, a bit of business that makes me think briefly of Carolus.

  I could hit her, whip her, maim her, slit her thick throat for impudence. Could.

  “I tell women for you,” she says. “Cool cloth, light food. I tell.”

  “Will you not do what you’re told?”

  She shrugs.

  It comes out of me before I can stop it: “Please.”

  She flinches. I might as well have hit her, because I can’t keep her now.

  “You stupid woman,” I say.

  The talk at court is of war and war and war, now, but Philip is playing a deeper game, and once again his army seems to stall. He takes the port city of Naupactus but then sends embassies to Thebes and Athens. Word comes, too, that Speusippus has died at Athens. With Philip in a diplomatic mood, I write immediately to put my name up for election as leader of the Academy, and write to let Philip know. At night, by lamplight, I sit with Pythias and tell her about Athens, try to conjure it for her in the shadows. She’s a flower, I tell her, in Macedonian mud; her refinement is better suited to a Southern life. The weather is milder there, I tell her, none of these endless winter rains. The houses, it’s true, are smaller, but more tasteful and elegant. The temples are more diverse, the food more tempting, the theatre more sophisticated. The greatest actors, the greatest music in the world! And the Academy (is she asleep? no, the room is too silent; she’s listening), the Academy, where the greatest minds apply themselves to the greatest problems, where one glimpses order behind the chaos. On and on I speak, sketching the beauty of the life I’ll arrange there, the tranquillity, and eventually, toward morning, she sleeps.

  The next day, as she lies drenched and feverish, I palpate her swollen belly and she screams.

  “How is lady?” Athea stops me again in the hall, Little Pythias on her hip.

  I will have to find a nursemaid. Pythias is too weak to care for the child, and Athea—Athea, Athea. I won’t sand my baby girl down with such rough Northern paper.

  “Go see for yourself.”

  Little Pythias holds out her arms, and shouts at me when I don’t take her.

  Ten days later I receive a response to my letter: the Academy thanks me for my interest, and informs me it has selected an Athenian, Xenocrates, to lead the school. He is a senior Academician, and known to all as a scholar, an able administrator, and a patriot.

  At court, Alexander sits in a lesser chair beside the empty throne, Antipater beside him. They look over the Academy’s letter together. Alexander reads faster but pretends not to. I see his eyes fall from the paper to his lap when he’s done, even though his head never moves.

  “I’ll put it in dispatches,” Antipater says. “Other business?”

  I clear my throat. “I thought we might discuss other tactics. If there’s some leverage that might be used, some political pressure, some way of making them reverse the decision—”

  “This is not a pressing issue,” Antipater says.

  I look for something yielding in him. Grim mouth, unblinking eyes. His wife won’t sew with my wife. “I’m not Athenian,” I say.

  He gestures at the letter as though to say, You want to be.

  “We could have Xenocrates assassinated,” Alexander says.

  “Other business,” Antipater says.

  Smirks, sniggers. The other men in attendance are too old or too young to fight. I, of course, am neither.

  “See to it yourself, my buck,” one of the old ones says, for me to overhear. “If you want it so badly.”

  “He wants it,” another says. “Look at him. He’s crying.” Hisses from around the room.

  “Shut up, all of you,” Alexander says. “My head hurts.”

  Antipater looks up at me.

  “I’ll do it myself,” Alexander says. “Why not? It’s a valuable position. We could use him there.”

  “We will discuss this privately,” Antipater says. “Other business?”

  “Fuck you,” Alexander says. “You’re not my father.”

  “Let’s discuss it now, then,” Antipater says. “No. You are not going alone to Athens to snuff some hundred-year-old egghead with a protractor for a dick. You’re a prince of Macedon. That particular piece of nonsense is not for you.”

  Antipater catches my eye.

  “Xenocrates was a friend of mine, long ago,” I say. “We studied together.” I bow deeply to Alexander. “Forgive my emotion. My disappointment makes me irrational. Shall we discuss the embassies, instead? I had an idea—”

  “Dismiss,” Antipater says.

  A bark of laughter all around at the half-second it takes me to realize he’s talking to me. Alexander flinches at the sound.

  “They abuse you,” the prince says that afternoon.

  We’re alone. Hephaestion doesn’t show and Alexander has dismissed his remaining companions with a rare pissiness. “You, too,” he told Ptolemy, who hesitated at the door. “I’m sick of you. You like being a nursemaid?”

  “Understandably,” I say now. “They’ve chosen me to represent what they hate. Whether that’s a fair choice is beside the point. How’s your head?”

  “I should have thought it was the entire point. You were a friend to my father and to Antipater, and they treat you this way.”

  I look at the range of possible responses to this and decide to lay down two or three at once.

  “One, I would not so glorify myself as to call myself a friend to your father. I am his subject, his sometime adviser, and his son’s tutor. One does not easily befriend a king. Two, if your father loses to Athens, he loses everything. That is an enormous strain to be under; understandably, he and Antipater will be hostile to anyone even remotely connected with the enemy. Three, you yourself know friendship is a most complicated relationship, more complicated at times than the affection between man and wife. It is also the more valuable.”

  He shrugs.

  “No,” I say. “A king is at all times articulate.”

  “Talk, talk, talk. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of lessons and diplomacy and staying home to charm visitors to my father’s court. Do you know what Carolus taught me? He said there is never truth in words, but only in the body. He said whenever a character speaks, it’s to hide his true meaning. Words are the surface you have to look beneath. He said the best actors speak with their bodies, and their gestures are more memorable than their words.”

  “I assume he was speaking of the stage.” I assume he was trying to get the boy on all fours.

  “He was speaking of life. We are all truer in the body than we ever can be in speech.”

  “I would love to see Carolus express a Pythagorean theorem without speech.”

  “I want to fight.” Alexander looks at me bleakly. “Means and ends, you always talk about means and ends, and what a thing is fitted for. That’s your genius, isn’t it, applying a few little concepts across such a wide range of subjects? That’s what Lysimachus says. Such a very few ideas that you apply so very, very broadly.”

  “Lysimachus.”

  “Why won’t my father go to war? Why won’t he summon me? I’m fitted to fight. War is the greatest means to the greatest end, the glory of Macedon. Why won’t he just fight?”

  “Your father is engaged in diplomatic overtures—”

  Alexander spits.

  “—as the smartest means to the end you both so value, the glory of Macedon. Your father wants Persia. He doesn’t want to cripple the Greeks, to rub their noses in it. He’s going to need them. They’re not an expendable enemy, they’re irreplaceable allies. He needs their resources—You’re having headaches again?”

  I don’t know if he hears me or
not. “I’m sick of staying home. Look what I did at Maedi, and you know what he said to me?” A moment, a ripple across the clear surface of things. It’s the first time either of us has mentioned Maedi. “He told me if I ever went out on my own again while he was alive he’d sever my hamstring and tell everyone I tripped on my own sword. Then I’d have to stay home for the rest of my life.”

  “Your father suffers from what in an ordinary man we would call an excess of the virtue of pride. I’m not sure if such a thing is possible in a king. We are wasting time.” I’m angry suddenly and don’t care if he knows. I’m Macedonian to the Athenians and Athenian to the Macedonians. Maedi was a triumph; the Academy is not a pressing issue. “We are wasting each other’s time. You would like to be with the army and I would like to be in Athens writing books. Alas, we are left to each other’s company. Shall we make the best of an unpleasant situation and get this lesson over with as quickly as possible so we can each return to our own solitary pursuits? Show me your notes from last time.”

  I’ve only ever lashed out at him like this once before, in the stables years ago. His response takes me right back there. His eyes widen, and he immediately hands over his notes to placate me, to get me to lower my voice. I’ve found his Achilles’ heel, the one thing he fears: someone abusing him who won’t lower his voice. Her voice?

  We review the work we began on ethics and the virtues. That ethics is indeed a science, though it wants the precision of a science like geometry; that, as we learned from our study of metaphysics, everything aims at some end or good; that such ends exist in a hierarchy leading to the ultimate human end, happiness. And what is happiness? Pleasure is superficial, virtue is compatible with unhappiness, great wealth is merely a means to a further end rather than an end in itself, “goodness” is an abstraction, an empty concept. Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, where a virtuous act requires both act and motive. “Name me a virtue.”

  “Courage.”

  “Yes. What do we call a want of courage?”