Beyond the Flesh Of Euphronios (Πέρα από τη σάρκα του Ευφρονίου)

-From The Meletic Tales.

In the rugged hills of ancient Crete, where the winds whispered through groves and the stones of old gods still pressed against the earth, there stood an abandoned temple—its roof half-collapsed, its marble columns softened by moss and time. Within this forgotten sanctum lived Euphronios, an old hermit whose very name was seldom uttered by those in the nearby village.

Euphronios bore marks that set him apart. His face was deformed and skin was taut in some places, mottled and cracked in others due to his affliction. Children were told not to look at him too long, for fear of curses, and grown men avoided the path leading to the temple as if a plague slept amongst its stones, but Euphronios did not curse them. He did not shout. He remained with his shadow lingered as his suffering.

He had once been a stonecutter, chiselling the very temple he now called home, but years had passed, and with them, his body had withered under the burden of lesions and twisted limbs. Within the folds of pain and rejection, a strange tranquillity had settled upon him. He had turned his suffering into deep contemplation, and from contemplation arose something rarer still: wisdom.

He walked with a staff, carved from a laurel tree struck by lightning. The villagers whispered of it. Some said it hummed when he touched the earth, but none dared approach. Except one.

Polybius was young, still tangled in the curiosity of his mind, yet stepping into the quiet unrest of a maturing soul. He had heard the stories—how Euphronios once bled fire and drank only rain, but one summer morning, after a quarrel with his father and a growing dread that his life would fade into toil and dullness, he set out for the temple on a personal journey to find himself.

The walk was longer than he expected. Stones shifted beneath his sandals and cicadas screamed from the heat. When he finally stood before the temple’s broken gate, doubt curled around his chest.

'What do you seek?' A voice rasped behind him.

Polybius flinched. In the shadow of a pillar, the hermit emerged, cloaked not only in cloth but in scars.

'I don’t know', he admitted.

Euphronios tilted his head. 'Then you’ve already come further than most people have dared to'.

They said little more that day. The young man sat by the entrance whilst the old man collected water in clay pots, but Polybius returned the next day, and the day after, until the silence between them softened into something like friendship. For the first time, Euphronios had met a person who was not easily intimidated or fearful of his deformity.

'I have questions', Polybius confessed one afternoon.

'Most do', said Euphronios, crushing herbs in a bowl. 'But few are ready to hear the answers provided'.

'I’m tired of living a life without meaning. I fear growing old and realising I never truly lived'.

Euphronios nodded, slowly. 'What is it to truly live? To the world I am a deformed man, who lives in his solitude, because I was shunned by society'.

'That must be a dreadful life'.

'It may appear to be, but I have overcome my suffering'.

'How, if I may ask?

'By accepting my fate'.

'I thought it was honour I seek, success. I’ve watched men gain both and still feel empty'.

'Then you’ve been watching well'.

Polybius frowned. 'You suffer every day, yet you seem... whole. How?'

The old man paused, setting down the pestle. 'Because I have learnt that suffering is not the enemy. It is the threshold. What lies beyond it is presence. Endurance and insight. Suffering does not need to define me as a man'.

He rose and walked to the doorway, where the sun streamed like liquid gold across the stone.

'When the body is marked, the soul must rise. It must find a light not reliant on the world’s reflection'.

Polybius began to visit daily. He helped the old man tend to the wild herbs around the temple, and Euphronios, in return, shared stories—of the people who once roamed the hills, and of the Logos that threaded through all things shaped by the Nous.

One day, as they watched the sky darken before the storm, Euphronios said, 'Do you know the virtue of humility?'

Polybius shrugged. 'Not thinking too much of oneself?'

'It is deeper. It is the courage to accept the truth of what one is—marked, fragile, but not broken. To bow before the world not in shame, but in awe'.

The rain fell, drumming on the temple’s stones. Euphronios did not move. His eyes, veiled by age, still held a clarity that pierced the chest of Polybius.

'People think me curst, but they do not see what I’ve gained: the stripping away of sheer illusion. The knowing that every breath is a gift, not a divinity'.

That night, Polybius dreamt of roots growing from his feet into the earth, anchoring him whilst winds tore through his body, yet he stood.

One evening, as dusk painted the sky in violets and amber, Euphronios and Polybius sat in the temple's inner sanctum.

'You see these walls?' The old man asked.

Polybius nodded.

'Once, they held hymns and prayers. Now they hold echoes. Do you know the difference?'

Polybius thought. 'A hymn is offered. An echo... remains. Is that not the case?'

'Precisely. So it is with suffering. What we offer to it—patience, grace and self-acceptance—echoes within us. If we listen carefully, that echo becomes a guide'.

As summer waned, so too did Euphronios. His breath came slower. The lesions on his arms grew darker.

'I feel the Hyparxis stir', he murmured one evening.

Polybius knew the term. Euphronios had spoken of it—being beyond being, the quiet return to To Ena, the One.

'I don’t want you to go', said the boy, tears welling.

'Then you must let me go. That is how you honour me'.

Polybius remained by Euphronios' side in the months that followed, returning daily to the crumbled columns and vine-wrapped place. His visits were no longer prompted by curiosity, but by reverence. Where the villagers saw deformity, Polybius now saw quiet strength. Where others saw a cursed recluse, he now recognised a soul whose wisdom outshone the appearance of his afflicted flesh.

‘Why do you sit with me, Polybius?’ Onomakrites asked one early morning, his hands unsteady slightly as he stirred herbs into boiling water.

‘Because your words stay with me longer than anyone else's silence’, the young man replied. ‘Because the temple may have collapsed, but you have not’.

Euphronios gave a hoarse chuckle. ‘Words are just shaped air. It is not my words, but your listening that changes you’.

Polybius sat back, eyes narrowing. ‘Without your wounds, would you have seen the world as you do?’

Euphronios nodded slowly. ‘The flesh is a gate. Through suffering, we either shut the gate or pass through it. Those people who only see pain curse the gate. Those people who enter it, find what lies beyond it’.

He pointed to a lizard sunning itself on a cracked stone. ‘Even that creature knows when to be still. Humans forget that stillness is a form of wisdom too’.

The seasons turned. Winter came and brought snow into the broken roof. Polybius arrived one morning to find Euphronios wrapped in layers of wool, coughing into a cloth stained red. Death had begun its quiet approach.

‘I shall not be here much longer. I do not leave behind a sorrow of my own to be passed on to another', Euphronios rasped.

‘Don’t speak like that’, Polybius said. ‘You’re stronger than you know and believe'.

‘I am not strong’, Euphronios whispered. ‘I am surrendered. That is different’.

That evening, Euphronios spoke more than usual. He spoke of the days before his affliction, when he too had walked through the village unremarked upon. A fall in his youth, followed by a burning fever that had distorted the symmetry of his skin and his face, benting his spine into a twisted posture. First came pity, then revulsion, then the worst of all punishments which was exile.

‘I went into the hills to find silence. Silence gave me something else that is presence. I began to feel the breath of the trees, the hum of time in my bones. I began to listen—not to gods or men—but to what was beneath all things', he said.

‘What did you hear?’

‘To Ena, the One. Not in voice, but in quietude. The stillness that connects all things to awareness. That is where I learnt Meletic thought—although I had never heard it named as such’.

Polybius shifted closer, his brow furrowed. ‘All this pain… what has it taught you?’

‘That the body is not our enemy. It is our reminder. Pain brings attention. Attention brings awareness, and awareness when tempered by humility, gives birth to wisdom’.

Euphronios placed a frail hand over Polybius’ own. ‘You will leave this place one day, and the world will test you in ways you cannot yet imagine, but remember: the soul is not harmed by hardship, only by forgetting itself’.

The next morning, Euphronios did not rise. His eyes were closed, his chest still. Polybius wept as he wrapped the old man’s body in a cloth Euphronios had once used as a blanket. He carried him, with slow and deliberate steps, to the grove near the edge of the hills—the one place Onomakrites would sit and face the sunrise meditating.

There, he dug a resting place beneath an olive tree, planting Euphronios in the embrace of the earth. Then, for many days, he sat beside it.

Spring returned, and with it, a sapling grew. Not from the tree, but from the very place where Euphronios had been laid. It sprouted as if drawn forth by the humility and patience buried beneath. Its leaves shimmered oddly—neither olive nor cypress—bearing a silvery hue that caught the light in dancing shapes.

Villagers who once avoided the hill now came to speak with Polybius. Some came out of curiosity, others with offerings, and a few even brought their children. They stood beneath the tree, whispered their regrets, and found themselves leaving in silence, changed in ways they could not explain.

Polybius spoke little. He had become the tree’s silent guardian, his own face gradually marked by lines of contemplation and grief softened by grace.

One afternoon, a young girl came to him with tears in her eyes. ‘My mother says I am ugly’, she whispered.

Polybius knelt beside her and offered no denial. ‘Come. Sit’.

They sat beneath the tree’s shade. ‘Do you see this tree?’ He asked. ‘It grew from a man who was called uglier than any in the land, but he was more beautiful in the soul than all of them’.

‘How?’ The girl asked.

‘Because he knew that true beauty is the virtue that grows quietly when no one watches. Patience, gentleness, courage and honesty. These do not wilt’.

The girl looked at the bark, then at her hands. She did not smile, but her eyes grew calm.

That night, Polybius sat alone and whispered into the dark. ‘Euphronios, they are beginning to see the light of your wisdom'.

The years passed. Polybius grew into manhood, then into elderhood. The villagers no longer shunned the temple. They restored parts of it, not to worship a god, but to honour a soul. They called it the house of quiet flame—named after Euphronios' final teachings, and the symbolic fire of inner clarity.

On the wall of the rebuilt chamber, Polybius inscribed words remembered from their final conversations: ‘Suffering is not a curse. It is a chisel. It shapes the soul into form'.

Another line: ‘The flesh may break, but the soul bends toward To Ena’.

And at the base of the tree: ‘Here lies Euphronios—marked in flesh, but whole in the soul’.

Many visitors came to read these words, and some stayed long enough to understand their actual meaning.

Children grew up hearing the tale of the hermit who taught a village to see beyond surfaces. Travellers brought new scrolls and read of Meleticism. The tale of To Ena—and the interconnection of all things began to root itself in the villagers' own outlooks. They would embrace the philosophy and become Meletics.

Polybius, now aged and stooped like his teacher once was, spent his days beneath the tree, writing. He wrote not for fame, but for clarity—for those who would come after him. He compiled Euphronios' sayings, added reflections of his own, and titled the work: Beyond the flesh: Teachings from the house of quiet flame.

On the final page, he wrote: ‘I thought I went to the temple to meet a hermit.
I left having met myself’.

One dawn, much like the one when Euphronios passed, Polybius laid down beneath the tree and did not rise. The villagers buried him beside the hermit in the same grove, now fragrant with blossoms that never bloomed elsewhere in Crete.

From their graves, a second tree grew—intertwining with the first. Its bark was darker, its leaves broader. Together, they formed a canopy, sheltering all who sought wisdom.

Children now say that if you sit between the two trunks at dusk and listen closely, you will hear a voice—gentle, patient, ageless—whispering:

‘The soul remembers what the world forgets.’

Thus, the tale of Euphronios did not end with death, nor Polybius’ life with silence. Instead, it continues in the rustling of leaves, in the questions of children, and in the patience of those willing to look beyond the mortal flesh.

One dawn, much like the one when Euphronios passed, Polybius laid down beneath the tree and did not rise. The villagers buried him beside the hermit, in the same grove, now fragrant with blossoms that never bloomed elsewhere in Crete. They wrapped him in linen stitched with verses from his own writings and placed a carved stone by his head—not to mark status or lineage, but to honour the quiet flame he had tended within.

From their graves, a second tree grew—intertwining with the first. Its bark was darker, its leaves broader. Together, they formed a canopy, sheltering all who sought wisdom. Their roots entwined below the soil, unseen but inseparable, just as their lives had become.

Children now say that if you sit between the two trunks at dusk and listen closely, you will hear a voice—gentle, patient, ageless—whispering: ‘The soul remembers what the world forgets’.

Others claim the leaves rustle even when the wind is still, as though remembering stories not yet spoken. The villagers do not call this magic. They call it presence. A lingering acceptance of the truth, born not of miracles, but of devotion, pain and reflection.

An elder named Theokritos, once a sceptic of both Euphronios and Polybius, took it upon himself to record what he called the 'Two Trees Teachings'. He would sit beneath the canopy every morning, scroll in hand, listening to what he called ‘the hush between thoughts’. Over time, his heart softened and he too began to speak in the cadence of Meletic thought.

‘We are all trees in the making’, he wrote. ‘Each experience a root, each virtue a branch. Our sufferings, like the wind, bend us towards the light if we allow them’.

The grove became a place of passage. Not only did the people come to remember the two men—they came to reckon with their own shadows. Some would arrive broken by grief, some by betrayal, others in quiet discontent. They did not ask for answers. They came to sit.

‘To listen is to begin the healing', one woman would say.

One spring, a boy named Doros came to the grove after the death of his brother. He refused to speak for days, not even to his mother, but he returned daily, sitting cross-legged beneath the trees, tracing the pattern of fallen leaves. On the seventh day, he stood and spoke aloud: ‘You are not gone. You are changed’.

He did not explain who he meant, but his mother wept quietly, and from that day onwards, Doros began to smile again.

The elders built a small stone bench between the trees. Not as a shrine, but as a place to pause. They carved words into the bench’s edge in quiet script: ‘In presence, all things are known. In patience, all wounds are heard’.

No priest tended to the grove. No rituals were enforced. The place needed none. It thrived on intention. On reflection. On the gentle unfolding of those who sat and dared to feel.

In time, the teachings of Euphronios and Polybius made their way into the village school, not as doctrine, but as part of living history. Children were taught to observe rather than judge, to ask ‘what does this mean?’ instead of ‘what is this for?’ Every year, on the day of the autumn equinox, the village gathered at the grove not for celebration, but for Meletic silence.

They would sit in a circle around the trees, each person given a moment to share a single truth they had discovered that year. Some were small—‘I have learnt to wait without anger’. Others profound—‘I have forgiven myself’. Alhough not all spoke, all listened. That, they said, was enough.

Still, through all these years, the twin trees grow. One twisted in light, the other in shadow—yet neither without the other. They are reminders that beyond deformity and grief, beyond silence and exile, there is still a place for fruitfulness, for grace, for virtue patiently grown.

The tale of Euphronios and Polybius, then is not just a tale of pain overcome or wisdom won. It is the story of how presence—pure and unembellished presence—can become its own kind of sanctuary.

It is said that every person who visits the grove leaves with a different feeling. Some call it peace. Others clarity. A few simply call it stillness, but they agree that they return with more than they came with. In that way, the trees still speak to the soul.

Beneath those boughs, where Euphronios once suffered and taught, the breeze carries more than mere air—it carries memory, and meaning, and the breath of the One.

Some people say they feel watched—not by eyes, but by something vast and gentle, as if the grove itself remembers. Children grow quiet there. The old often weep without knowing why, and the young leave with questions they cannot yet name. In silence, the grove gives. In that giving, the presence of Euphronios still lives.

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