Classical Genius

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...