A sophisticated historical novel, not just an adventure story or romance with a colourful setting. The narrator is Aristotle and the story mainly concerns his service as tutor to the young Alexander, though there are relatively brief flashbacks to earlier periods in Aristotle's life. This initially struck me as extremely audacious -- how can you write in the voice of one of the great ancient philosophers? But Lyon seems to manage it well enough, in modern English literary prose. The story is told in the present tense, in an intimate manner a bit like a diary.
The title refers to an idea that Aristotle presents to the nearly mature Alexander, which seems to intrigue him, that it's good to recognize extremes in all things and find a moderate way between them. Aristotle's own personality is described by an intimate in terms that suggest some degree of what we would call bipolar disorder, though I didn't notice much of these extremes in his own narrative. Ultimately he and Alexander are opposites as well, it appears.
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