The Aulos Of Aphrodisia (Η Αυλός της Αφροδισίας)

-From The Meletic Tales.

In the marble city of Aphrodisias, where the fountains whispered and laurel trees danced with the wind, there lived a maiden named Aphrodisia, whose name was as fitting as the melodies that flowed from her lips and fingers. She was young, with hair the colour of ripe figs and eyes as dark as olive stones, but it was not her beauty that made her known through region and beyond—it was her enchanting music.

Aphrodisia had inherited from her grandmother a rare and ancient aulos—carved of dark cypress wood, with twin pipes that curved like the horns of a sacred ram. Etched upon it were symbols no one could translate—some people said they were Pelasgian, others whispered they came from the time before the Titans. It was said the instrument had once been offered in the sanctuary of Harmonia herself, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, and that it held the breath of divine concord within its wood.

When Aphrodisia played the aulos, the air grew still. Doves would fall silent mid-flight, and even the arguing fishmongers near the agora would pause. Her music was neither cheerful nor sorrowful, but something deeper—like the sound the stars might make if they could speak. People called her ‘the one with the divine fingers’, and even the priests of Dionysus, known for their ecstatic pride, bowed their heads when she passed.

Harmony as the Meletic philosophers taught is not merely sound that pleases the ear. It is the balance of inner forces, the tuning of the soul to the Logos. This Aphrodisia did not yet understand in her life.

One morning, as the cicadas began their chorus and the sun gilded the marble steps of the Temple of Aphrodite, Aphrodisia wandered beyond the city gates. She sought solitude in a grove where poplars leaned over a stream. There she often practised her aulos, letting its twin voices accompany the wind and water.

That morning, as she played a slow, curling tune—meant to honour the rising light—she noticed a figure seated not far from her. He was older, with a beard streaked with silver and robes the colour of faded parchment. His eyes, however, were vivid—clear as a mountain spring.

She lowered the aulos and asked, ‘You’ve come to listen?’

The old man inclined his head. ‘Not merely to listen. To learn what you do not yet know about the music you carry’.

Aphrodisia frowned. ‘Who are you to say what I know or not?’

‘I am Nikodemos. A philosopher of the Meletic way. I dwell in no city, but I dwell in reason. I heard your playing three days ago from the hills. I tell you—your music is beautiful, but not yet whole’, he said.

She narrowed her eyes. ‘You question the harmony of the aulos?’

‘No. I question the harmony of the soul that breathes into it’.

Aphrodisia laughed, even though not mockingly. ‘I was told once that my playing made a Spartan warrior weep’.

Nikodemos smiled. ‘Tears can fall from confusion as much as from clarity. Shall I sit a while?’

She gestured beside her. ‘You may, if you promise not to turn my notes into obscure riddles’.

‘I promise to listen first’.

So he listened as she played again. When she was done, he said nothing for a long while. The stream murmured. A cricket sang from a fig branch above them.

At last he said, ‘You command tone. You stir emotion, but you play only from the skin of your being. The soul has not yet spoken to you'.

She turned to him, uneasy now. ‘How can you know the soul of another?’

‘By the measure of silence left after the voice fades. Your music does not echo within—it evaporates’.

Aphrodisia set down her aulos and folded her arms. ‘What would you have me do? Fast beneath the moon? Pray to stones? Deny the gift I’ve been given since birth?’

‘None of those, but learn to dwell within yourself as much as you dwell in others’ admiration. You seek harmony through sound, yet forget that the truest harmony is the accord between one’s thoughts, one’s deeds, and the Logos’, Nikodemos said.

‘You speak of the Logos like if it was or is a living god’.

‘It is not a god. It is the principle that governs the world—the reason that weaves through all existence. It is not to be worshipped but to be lived. When your music springs from the Logos, not just talent, it will no longer seduce—it will reveal the truth to you’.

Aphrodisia said nothing for a long time. She stared at the grooves in the aulos.

‘How does one live by this Logos that your profess?’

Nikodemos looked to the sun filtering through the leaves. ‘By turning inwards. By observing without judging. By listening to your own disquietude. Once you understand the Logos, then you will understand the Nous and To Ena, the One'.

'To Ena. Who is the One?' She asked.

'It is what emanates onto the Logos and the Nous', Nikodemos replied.

'Teach me'.

'Come back here tomorrow. Bring your aulos—but bring also your questions’.

She did return. For something in his words had left her wondering—not defensive, but curious.

Each day they met beneath the poplars, and each day he gave her no instruction in music, only riddles of the soul.

‘What is the self?’ He asked one day.

‘It is what I feel. What I remember. What I desire’, she answered.

‘Then what is the part of you that observes the feeling, remembers the memory and watches the desire rise?’

She had no answer.

He would say, ‘Play a melody for sorrow’. She did.

‘Now play for longing'. She did.

‘Now play what cannot be named’. She hesitated.

‘I don’t know how’.

‘Then begin to listen before you play’.

Thus, she did. She began to sit in silence. To listen to the rustling trees, not for inspiration but for understanding. She would hear her own breath—how it trembled when she thought of the praise she once sought. How her hands tensed when she feared being forgotten. The more she listened, the more she realised her music had once been armour—a veil spun from skill to keep her from meeting herself.

Nikodemos once said, ‘The aulos is not the source—it is the conduit. The breath you give it must be drawn from the well of being, not the well of applause’.

The weeks passed. Aphrodisia’s melodies changed. They became slower, more spacious. Some said they were no longer as intoxicating, but others—those with wearied eyes and weathered hearts—sat longer when she played. They lingered in the silence after the music ended, feeling something cosmic was being expressed through her music.

One evening, a child approached her after a song and said, ‘Your song made my thoughts stop moving’.

Aphrodisia knelt. ‘Is that good or bad?’

‘I don’t know, but I liked it. I wasn’t afraid when it was quiet’.

She smiled and said, ‘Then I think the music did what it must’.

Eventually, word reached the elders of a Meletic Temple. They invited her to perform at the midsummer rites. It was the first time she had been summoned by members of a temple in years.

When she arrived, garbed not in rich robes but in simple linen, many were surprised. She bore no cosmetics, no gold. Only the aulos and a calm that seemed untouched by expectation.

Before she played, she looked out at the crowd observing them.

‘I once played to be praised. Now I play to remember what we are beneath the noise’, she confessed.

She raised the aulos and played a piece no one had heard before.

It began as a whisper, as though the earth were exhaling. The twin pipes danced not in competition but in concord, like twin wings of the same bird. The sound was not a tune, but a tide—ebbing into stillness, rising into release.

Some people closed their eyes. Others wept quietly, even though they could not say why. A priest dropped the thyrsus from his hand. A sceptic bowed his head.

When she finished, the silence that followed was not empty—it was full, as if something had entered them all and gently settled.

Nikodemos, watching from the colonnade, smiled and said to himself, ‘The harmony has begun’.

After the rites, no feast was held. No revelry broke the evening. People went home quietly, speaking in hushed voices.

Aphrodisia found Nikodemus walking the perimeter of the grove.

‘Is this what you meant?’ She asked.

He turned to her. ‘It is not what I meant. It is what you have remembered. The aulos sings not to dazzle, but to disclose the echoes of the Logos'.

She nodded slowly. ‘I used to think beauty was what stirred hearts, but beauty without balance fades quickly’.

‘Balance without beauty is dry, but you have found the meaning between them. That is the Logos expressed', he added.

She looked down at the aulos. The carvings now seemed less like decoration and more like echoes—marks of something ancient not in age, but in truth.

‘What now? Do I teach others? She asked.

‘Only if they are ready to follow. The Logos is not a lesson—it is a path, and every soul must walk it as they are able. Walk with them in the Meletic path.

She smiled and said, ‘Then I shall keep walking in this path of mine and allow others to join me’.

Walk she did. Not to fame, but to self-acceptance. She travelled to other towns, not to perform but to observe. She listened to shepherds’ flutes, to old women’s lullabies. She sat with widows, with potters and with blind men who spoke of countless dreams.

Wherever she went, she played only when the silence invited it.

Years later, when she returned to Aphrodisias as a woman of serenity and not performance, her name was still remembered—but no longer worshipped. And that, she knew, was good.

She passed by the agora, where a young girl was playing a crude reed pipe, fumbling through the notes.

Aphrodisia sat beside her. ‘Your fingers are tense’, she said gently.

‘I’m afraid of making a mistake,’ the girl replied.

Aphrodisia offered a smile. ‘Then let the mistake come. It may teach you more than perfection ever could’.

As the girl played again, Aphrodisia listened—not to the notes, but to the soul behind them. In that listening, the harmony continued.

The girl’s name was Helena, and she followed Aphrodisia from that day forth—not as a student seeking fame, but as one seeking understanding. Aphrodisia did not correct her playing often. She would only ask, ‘Why did you choose that note?’ or ‘What did you feel when you played it?’

Sometimes Helena would answer, ‘I don’t know’.

Aphrodisia would nod and say, ‘Good. Then keep listening’.

In time, Helena began to write melodies of her own. They were not imitations, but genuine reflections—each one born from a thought she had sat with, a memory she had embraced or a silence she had endured.

One morning, as dew still clung to the grass, Helena played a tune she called ‘The turning leaf’. It was soft, barely audible, and when she finished, Aphrodisia’s eyes were wet.

‘You heard something true’, she said.

Helena beamed. ‘You once said music should reveal. I didn’t understand then. I think I do now’.

Aphrodisia placed her hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘One day, you may help another to understand, but not by teaching. By walking beside them’.

Thus, the tradition passed—not as doctrine, but as lasting presence. Not as commandment, but as awareness. Through one aulos, passed from grandmother to granddaughter, and through silence shaped into sound, the Logos continued to breathe.

The world, for those persons who listened, became just a little more harmonious in its nature.

One autumn, as the trees shed golden leaves upon the paths of the grove, Helena asked, 'Shall I know when I am ready to walk alone?’

Aphrodisia replied, ‘You will not know by certainty. You will know by the stillness in your step, and by the serenity in your silence’.

Helena nodded, although her heart ached. She had grown used to the quiet rhythm of their life together, but she also understood that the Logos moved not by clinging but by flow.

The day came when Helena rose at dawn and found Aphrodisia already seated by the stream. The aulos rested beside her, and the older woman looked out at the water.

‘You are leaving today’, Aphrodisia said, without turning.

‘I am’, Helena whispered.

Aphrodisia turned and held out the aulos. ‘Then take this. It was never mine. It belonged to the one who could listen beyond herself’.

Helena took the instrument with trembling hands. ‘But I’m not you’.

‘You are not meant to be. You are Helena. Let your soul carve new echoes in its wood’.

They embraced. No more words were needed. The silence between them was full of sheer gratitude.

Helena departed not with a song, but with a silence so rich that every village she passed felt it before she played a single note.

The aulos carried on—not merely through melody, but through actual meaning.

In the philosophy of Meleticism, it is said: the harmony of the world is not a sound, but a way of being.

Those persons who listened deeply enough—through pipe or pause—could still hear the Logos breathe. Even now. Even here.

The years passed. Aphrodisia would die, but Helena travelled across Ionia and into the highlands of Arcadia, playing not at courts or theatres, but in fields, shrines and quiet marketplaces in memory of Aphrodisia. She did not seek renown, although it followed her in hushed tones. Her music, like her teacher’s did not dazzle—it stirred something ancient. It did not demand the listener to feel, but invited them to remember.

In a mountain hamlet above the olive valleys, she met a shepherd whose wife had died that spring. He told her he had not sung to his flock since her passing, as if his breath had shattered. Helena sat on a stone and played—not a lament, but a melody that bore the dusk upon its shoulders. It was not mournful, nor joyous. It simply was. When she stopped, the shepherd wept—not from despair, but from recognition. That night, he sang again, not perfectly, but with wholeness.

Elsewhere, a mute child placed trembling fingers on her instrument. He did not know how to play. His breath was uneven, and the sounds came in short, crooked bursts, but a moment came when the wind caught one long note, and the village birds stirred in the trees. The boy smiled. His mother, watching from afar, covered her mouth and cried.

In every town, Helena left behind no plaques or inscriptions. She left memory. Stillness. Sometimes, the echo of a tone that continued long after the note had ended.

When asked who had taught her, she would simply say, ‘A woman named Aphrodisia, who listened more deeply than anyone I have known before’.

She aged with grace. Time marked her, but lightly—as though the Logos preserved what it needed and gently carried away what it did not. Her hair silvered like winter branches; her fingers grew leaner, but no less precise.

One autumn morning, long after she had wandered through countless paths and sat beside countless lives, Helena returned to the grove. It was quieter now. The stream ran slower, as if it, too, had aged. The trees leaned more deeply into each other, like old friends in repose.

She sat where she had first spoken with Aphrodisia, and laid the aulos on her lap. The carvings were worn smooth in places. The wood was darker now, aged by both sun and soul. She did not play immediately.

Instead, she closed her eyes and listened. To the stream. To the leaves, and to the memory of silence that Aphrodisia had taught her to trust.

Only then did she raise the aulos to her lips.

What she played had no name. It was neither old nor new. It moved like breath and rested like dusk. When she finished, she looked to the trees and whispered, ‘Let it be carried’.

The wind obeyed, and somewhere in a village she had never seen, a child stopped mid-chore and felt something stir in the chest.

Somewhere else, an old woman smiled, and could not say why.

In a place beyond maps, where memory meets the unknown, Aphrodisia stirred in the presence of the grove. Not as a spirit, but as an impression—like the resonance left behind by a bell long faded.

Thus, the aulos of Aphrodisia, once a carved relic of the past, became more than an instrument. It became a current in the river of being—a passage for harmony, not as sound alone, but as way of life.

The Logos present, continued to breathe—through silence, through song and through the souls who dared to listen.

Even now. Even here in the unique echoes of the Logos.

One day, perhaps in a time far from theirs, the aulos would be found again—by hands not yet born, in a place not yet named. It would not be sought for fame or fortune, but simply discovered—quietly, reverently. When breath was given to it once more, it would not be the sound that astonished, but the stillness it awakened. In that moment, all who heard would remember—not the story of Aphrodisia or Helena, but the hidden harmony within themselves.

For the Logos never truly fades. It waits. It listens. It lives through those who do the same.

The grove remained—not as a monument, but as a living silence. Birds nested where Aphrodisia once sat. The stream, although slower, still sang its ancient hymn. Visitors came not with prayers or chants, but with questions in their hearts and leaves in their hands. Some stayed a day. Others stayed a season. All left changed in their experience.

They said the wind in that place sounded like music when no one played. They said the trees spoke, not in words, but in memory.

Some believed quietly that the aulos had never truly left. It had only passed into the existing breath of the world.

If one listened closely—not with ears alone, but with the soul—they might still hear it. A single, woven note drifting through time, reminding all: harmony begins within, and flows outwards.

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