The Golden Mean (20 page)

“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?”

“Cowardice.”

“Yes. And an excess?”

“An excess of courage?”

“Yes, yes. Don’t give me some stupid, pompous response to flatter yourself. Think.”

Quickly: “Rashness.”

“Yes. We have the extremes, and in the middle—”

Alexander holds out his hands, palms up, in that gesture he likes to mock me with.

“My few meagre tools with which I try to order the universe. You must look for the mean between extremes, the point of balance. The point will differ from man to man. There is not a universal standard of virtue to cover all situations at all times. Context must be taken into account, specificity, what is best at a particular place and time. You must—”

“That’s interesting.”

“Yes. That’s where I differ from my own teacher, insisting on particulars instead of universals. A less formally beautiful system, more pragmatic, but infinitely more flexible and applicable, if you—”

“No, not that part. What you said about the balance point this time. You’ve said it before, but—” He holds out his hands again in that familiar gesture. He’s staring at his own hands, thinking this time, not mocking.

“The truth in the body,” I can’t help saying.

“You can’t mean to prize mediocrity.”

I want to laugh at the way he’s skipped across the stepping stones. “Not at all. Moderation and mediocrity are not the same. Think of the extremes as caricatures, if that helps. The mean, what we seek, is that which is not a caricature. Mediocrity doesn’t enter into it, you see?”

“You.” Very slowly, holding out his left hand. Holding out his right: “My father.”

“Caricatures?” I say, very gently, not to discourage him. He seems very young just at the moment, a small boy trying so hard to understand.

“Extremes,” he says, just as carefully, still staring at his hands. “As though my father, to counter an extreme tendency in himself, prescribed the opposite extreme in you to create a balance in me.”

“That is—”

“I’m thinking, too, of my brother.”

“Who?”

He looks at me.

“I mean, you told me you didn’t have a brother. I’ve never heard you mention him since that day, how many, five years ago?”

“Am I an extreme, next to him? And what would be the mean of the two of us?”

“Do you swim?”

“Of course.”

“Do you?”

“A little.”

“I could teach you.”

He says nothing, waiting for what’s to come.

“I’ve been meaning to give your brother a day at the beach, a day out. We could all go together.”

“A swimming lesson.”

“A lesson in moderation. We spoke of pride before, and the excess of pride. Vanity, might we call that?”

“Yes.” I know he’s thinking of his father and the honours he grudged him at Maedi.

“And a lack of pride, a want of pride: shame.”

The flush begins to creep up his pretty cheeks.

“You’re ashamed of your brother. You are, aren’t you?”

Very softly: “We share blood.”

“He speaks. He’s clean. He doesn’t smell. He can ride, on a lead. He’s like a very, very small child in a grown man’s body. Once you get past the incongruity, it gets easier.”

“You would come?”

At first I’m not sure what he’s getting at.

“You wouldn’t leave me alone with him?”

I promise.

“Only my father might summon me first. If his embassies to Athens and Thebes fail, I might have to leave right away. Tomorrow, maybe, even.”

“I can’t tomorrow anyway,” I say. “I have some business tomorrow.”

“The day after tomorrow, then, if my father doesn’t send for me.”

I agree.

“What business, anyway? You don’t seem like a man of business to me. What’s tomorrow?”

“N
O
,” P
YTHIAS SAYS
.

“Love.” We’re in her room, early evening. She sits in her bed, propped with many pillows. I’ve come to present my case, not plead it. “She’s defiant. It’s intolerable.”

“She’s smart and competent. How has she defied you? Tell me and I’ll speak with her.”

I won’t tell her, not this truth. “She threatened to poison us.”

Pythias gives me a look. “She threatens to poison everyone six times a day. It’s how we know she’s happy. Since when are you such a tyrant with the slaves? Tycho refuses to bathe with the others and you haven’t sold him.”

“I’ve had Tycho for twenty years. Are you going to make a horse bathe if it doesn’t want to?”

“Tycho’s not a horse.”

I stand. This conversation is done. I do not say: Her function is devotion to you and she cannot perform her function. Her fear is uninteresting. A hawk’s fear, a dog’s fear, a horse’s fear is of no account. They perform the functions they are trained for or they do not. Her rebellion is more than just an inconvenience; it’s an affront to the natural order of things. It offends against everything I’ve pinned my sanity on, sweet stability and order, everything in its right place. I won’t be threatened.