Annabel Lyon helped by ‘CSI: Ancient Greece’ for novel on Aristotle’s daughter

TORONTO – Author Annabel Lyon had help from what she calls “CSI: Ancient Greece” as she wrote the new follow-up to her heralded debut novel, “The Golden Mean.”

Released in 2009, “The Golden Mean” is a fictional account of the time Greek philosopher Aristotle tutored a teenaged Alexander, before he was Great. It won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and made the short lists for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award.

Of course Lyon, who studied philosophy in university, could draw on many sources for that project.

But as she wrote in the voice of Aristotle’s daughter for its Giller longlisted sequel, “The Sweet Girl” (Random House of Canada), she couldn’t do the same since hardly anything is known about Pythias.

Still, Lyon enjoyed having the creative freedom to craft Pythias from her childhood through her teens, when she has to run the household and find her identity in a world in which many women weren’t allowed to have an education.

“I found it actually more rigorous to have to stay true to the historical facts as they were given to me,” the New Westminster, B.C.-based fiction writer said in a recent interview.

“It was a different sort of research, because instead of looking for specifics … it was more sort of, ‘What would the situation for women generally have been?’”

To conduct such research, Lyon journeyed to Greece in May 2010 with a group from Carleton University’s department of classics.

“I’m so glad that I did because there’s so much that ended up in the novel that wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise,” she said.

Those elements include the types of food the characters eat in the story, the tools they use, and their ancient practices, one of which is burying dead babies with puppies.

Lyon learned of that practice from a forensic anthropologist.

“She’s like ‘CSI: Ancient Greece’ woman,” Lyon said with a laugh. “She would examine bone remains and figure out how people had died. … Some of the work that she had done and written about was excavating these old dry wells from ancient times and they were full to the brim of these bones of babies and of puppies.”

Experts concluded some of the babies were born with physical deformities and were likely victims of mercy killings by midwives who buried them with puppies so they had companions as they moved on into the next world.

Lyon also learned about the magic women practised in those days to try to control their fertility and love lives, among other things.

“When we think of ancient Greece, we think of centaurs and Zeus throwing thunderbolts and stuff, but we don’t think of these women trying to take some kind of control of their lives,” said Lyon.

“And it seems those were acts that women would undertake as ways of exerting power over their lives.”

Such is the quest of Lyon’s Pythias, who gets her smarts and love of science from her aging dad.

At the start of the novel, Pythias is seven and boldly declares she wants to be a teacher and doesn’t want to get married.

Her viewpoint changes as she matures and, like most women at that time, becomes defined by her fertility and the sexist social beliefs that surround her.

As Pythias’s story unfolds, so too does an era of upheaval, as Alexander’s death forces Aristotle to flee Athens with his Macedonian family to Chalcis in fear he’ll be killed.

But once there, the household is no more stable, and a financially strapped Pythias faces a journey that takes her to the welcoming arms of priestesses, midwives and hetairas (high-end prostitutes).

“I remember really early on the way I kind of imagined her to my editor, we were kicking the ideas around and I said, ‘I want her to be a Jane Austen character who likes sex,’” said Lyon.

Lyon said the only concrete facts she had on Pythias came from Aristotle’s will, which detailed his plans for her.

“He lays out who he wants her to marry and all the things that he wants to happen to her,” said Lyon. “And you get a strong sense of his love for her through the document, and his worry.”

Writing the novel made Lyon realize she had “a pretty stereotypical view of what women were at that time.”

“I thought: in veils, kept in the house, illiterate, working their looms or whatever and not really doing much else,” she said.

“And certainly for one segment of society, the very highest upper classes, that was true. But there were many more opportunities than I had actually suspected from women.”

Like “The Golden Mean,” “The Sweet Girl” also has some salacious parts, including that of a god who is suspected of impregnating women in the community.

“There’s so much sex and violence and all that good stuff that we still love,” said Lyon of ancient Greece.

“I mentioned CSI, you know, ‘CSI: Ancient Greece,’ ‘CSI: New York’ — I don’t think it’s that far apart.”

Lyon, a mother of two who teaches creative writing full-time at the University of British Columbia, said she always knew she would write a sequel to “The Golden Mean.” Now that she’s finished it, she feels like she’s done with writing about that period of history.

“I feel like I’ve said what I want to say about that period and its relevance to ours, and I am so ready to come back to 21st century Vancouver for whatever the next thing is that I do.”