The Painter Who Became the Painting (Ο ζωγράφος που έγινε ο πίνακας)

-From the Meletic Tales.

In the bustling artisan quarter of Athens, nestled between stonemasons, poets and the sharp clang of bronze-smiths, there lived a young man named Epiphanes. He was neither renowned nor obscure, a painter of no fixed acclaim, whose works hung in dimly lit corners of modest homes or were bartered for olives and bread, but those who met him swore he carried something else in his gaze—a kind of knowing, a calm as if his thoughts wandered far beyond the agora and the chatter of daily life.

His home, a modest atelier with cracked clay walls and a door that always creaked, faced a small square where fig trees shaded resting workers and children played amongst fallen petals. Within, his canvas stretched not only across linen and plaster, but into forms that confused and unsettled the locals. For Epiphanes did not paint what was seen. He painted what was felt. What was beneath the surface of things.

'What’s this supposed to be, Epiphanes?' A tanner once asked, squinting at a painting that swirled with streaks of indigo, ochre and burnt sienna. 'Looks like a storm met a drunken man’s dream'.

'It is sorrow', Ephiphanes replied simply, brushing pigment into shape with his thumb.

The tanner scoffed and left. Others called his work 'nonsense', 'scribbles', or worse—'pretence'. A few would return, touched inexplicably. They said the paintings stirred memories, surfaced truths long buried. A potter wept once, standing before a painting she couldn’t name.

'It’s my mother’s voice. I don’t know how, but it is', she murmured.

Whispers began, then paused. The old ones argued in the markets, and the young ones stared longer than they meant to. Epiphanes never explained. He only painted.

Then came the mural. It appeared on the side of an old stone wall that overlooked the quarter’s outer courtyard. Epiphanes worked on it in silence for days, then weeks. He painted at dawn when the city was breathless and at dusk when the light softened like a hush. The work grew larger than any he had done before, rising higher than a man could reach without scaffold. He painted vines, roots, tall trees with gold-dusted leaves and amidst it all—a forest of such quiet mystery that even the wind seemed gentler.

In the forest, one saw things one couldn’t quite name. Shapes flickered within the shadows—a child reaching for light, a figure knelt in reverence, something hidden but watching. In the centre stood a young man robed in brown, his eyes looking slightly beyond the edge of the mural. He looked like Epiphanes.

‘Is that you?’ Asked an old fishmonger one evening, squinting.

Epiphanes only smiled and said, 'Perhaps'.

Then, one morning, he was gone. His atelier sat open, untouched, brushes still damp, as though he had just stepped out, but the neighbours swore they hadn’t seen him leave. The days passed. Then weeks. Still, no Epiphanes, yet the mural remained—untouched, unchanged, and somehow… alive.

Children began to claim they saw him moving in the painting, stepping between trees. A baker’s apprentice insisted she saw his hand lift once. Others said when the moon rose high, one could hear faint music coming from the wall. Laughter. Whispers.

‘He became the painting itself’, the potter declared.

‘Rubbish, He probably ran off to Corinth for a better life’, said the tanner.

None could deny that the mural had changed. Not in form, but in feeling. As if it breathed. As if it waited to be observed.

Word spread. Travellers came. They brought offerings—not of coins, but sketches, poems and small items that meant something to them. They laid them at the mural’s base, hoping to be understood. Many claimed they felt lighter afterwards. One young man swore the painting helped him decide to leave a life of crime. Another said he saw his dead brother in a flicker of the leaves.

Over time, the mural was no longer called just a painting. It was referred to as 'The threshold'.

A philosopher from Thebes visited, stood before it for hours, then scribbled down, 'Truth is the unseen behind the seen. This man painted not images, but the bridge to what lies within'.

Some scoffed. Others wept. One evening, an old woman approached with a lamp and placed a faded portrait at the foot of the mural. She whispered, ‘You found what we only dared to dream, Epiphanes. May we see it, too’.

The artisan quarter changed. Painters began to dare abstraction. Poets wrote lines with no rhythm but full of soul. Potters shaped urns with crooked beauty. The city mocked them at first—then paused. Looked. Understood.

The years passed. The mural never faded. Nor did the story. They say that if one stands long enough, and if one truly wishes to see beyond the veil, the man in the painting will turn to you. In his gaze, all that was once hidden within you will be laid bare—not to judge, but to show that you were always more than what the eye could see.

Thus, the tale of the painter who became the painting lived on, not merely in whispers and awe, but in every brushstroke daring to reach beneath the surface. In every soul brave enough to face itself.

The weeks after Epiphanes' disappearance were strange ones in the artisan quarter. The mural, which no one recalled him working on—at least not publicly—remained untouched, neither altered by time nor weather. The likeness of the man was perfect, unusual in its stillness. His robes, the gentle tilt of his head, the distant gaze in his eyes—it was him, surely him.

At first, it was the children who spread the tale.

‘He walked into it,’ said Theodosios, the baker’s son, who claimed to have seen Epiphanes touch the wall and vanish. ‘There was a light, and he was just… gone’.

The grown-ups laughed, as they do when tales unsettle them more than they’d admit.

Then came a strange thing: a woman from the potter’s row, who had never much cared for paintings, found herself sitting before the mural one late afternoon. She had passed by out of habit, but her feet stopped. The light on the wall shimmered. She saw—or thought she saw—a shift in the painted forest. Something behind Epiphanes, like breath or movement.

She returned the next day, and again. On the fourth day, she whispered to a companion: ‘The forest… it changes’.

That was when the rumour took root. Not everyone saw the change, of course. Many dismissed it outright, but those people who had once scoffed at Epiphanes' abstraction began to wonder. His paintings—once mocked for their formlessness—suddenly demanded contemplation. The mural did not shout its meaning. It invited silence.

One day, an old philosopher, Menekrates, who lived above the dyer’s shop, stood before the mural with a small group of students. He carried no staff and wore a robe spotted with ink, and yet he had the dignity of someone who had thought long and well.

‘He painted what lies beyond perception,’ he murmured, tracing the air before the wall. ‘Not what is, but what is becoming.’

‘But it’s only pigment on stone,’ one student said, puzzled.

‘To some people, but to others, it may be a mere veil’, replied Menekrates.

Thus, the tale transformed. It was said the painter had not gone mad, nor fled the city, but had found a path through form and colour into some other state. Into the ousia of things, the hidden essence.

Some people came to see the mural as a portal—although none could walk through. Others called it a mirror, not of appearance, but of soul. What one saw depended on who one was.

A quiet reverence began to form around the painting. A merchant left fresh figs at the base of the wall each morning, without saying why. A young girl sketched it repeatedly in charcoal, each time seeing something different in the trees. Once, a mute shepherd boy wept beside it for hours without explanation. It was not worship. There were no incense sticks, no chants. Only presence.

The painter’s home was left untouched. The city did not know what to do with his belongings, and so the shutters remained closed, the easels undisturbed. His scrolls, filled with writings on truth and vision, were found by a few quiet thinkers who copied fragments in secret.

One note, scribbled hastily in the margin of a sketch, read: 'What is seen is a surface. What is seen with the mind may still be a veil, but what is seen when all else is quiet—that is where I must go'.

Another simply read: 'I am not fleeing life. I am entering it'.

Some began to consider: perhaps Epiphanes had not disappeared, but completed something. As if the journey of a Meletic thinker—through contemplation, balance and observation—could lead to a transmutation not of body, but of perception. The painter had not died. He had become his vision.

The years passed. The artisan quarter changed. Families grew, shops shifted, wars came and went, yet the mural did not fade. Rain rolled from it as if the wall repelled time. Even as the buildings cracked and were repaired, the forest in the painting remained wild and quiet, serene.

People still came. Not tourists—Athens had none then, but seekers of the inner sort. Those weary of noise, or burdened with unseen questions. They sat by the mural not to speak, but to see.

Some brought their suffering. A young boy whose father had vanished in a storm came and stared at Epiphanes' face. ‘I think he is listening’, the boy said once.

Others brought silence. One blind man from Eleusis touched the stone and said he saw more than he ever had with eyes. ‘It is not about escaping the world,’ an old woman whispered once beneath the painting, ‘but seeing it as it truly is’.

Then, a strange thing occurred. A young painter named Eukles, who had once been ridiculed for creating sculptures from fragments of discarded wood, stood before the mural one night. He had always admired Epiphanes in secret—too afraid to say so, lest he be mocked by the people.

That night, under the stars, he touched the stone wall. He did not vanish, but he changed.

From that day forth, his art no longer sought approval. It sought truth. His pieces bore silence. His colours ceased to shout and began to whisper. When asked how he had changed, he replied simply: ‘I stopped painting what others expect. I began to paint what I know without knowing’.

People began to say that the mural was not a door but a turning—something within. Not a place one entered with feet, but with awareness. That was the Meletic truth it offered.

The painter had become the painting—not in flesh, but in essence. And the mural remained.

Epiphanes, gazing through time with eyes that saw past image. A forest that changed not with season, but with the soul of the observer.

Athens grew louder. Streets bustled, and empires shifted, but there in the artisan quarter beside a forgotten wall, a silence endured. In that silence, those people who looked—not merely with their eyes—found not escape, but understanding. The truth had never left. It had only changed form.

Amongst the many people who visited the mural in the years that followed, there was one who came without knowing why.

Her name was Dionisia, a weaver’s daughter from the hills beyond Piraeus. She had heard murmurs of the painting from traders who passed through her father’s village—men who spoke of a wall in Athens where the face of a man seemed to breathe, and the forest behind him whispered truths one could not speak aloud.

One evening, as the olive trees turned silver under the moonlight, Dionisia told her father she must go. She could not explain it, only that a thread had been tugged within her—not of longing, but of return. Her father, a quiet man, placed a skein of blue thread into her hand and said, ‘Whatever you find, hold the thread. It may help you come back’.

When she arrived in Athens, the quarter was noisier than she had imagined. The clatter of chisels and the shouting of merchants filled the morning air, but when she turned the final corner and came to the street where the mural stood, the noise dissolved. The space around the wall was still.

She saw it at once: the man Epiphanes, and the forest behind him.

She sat before it without speaking, and she waited.

The hours passed. Children passed by, laughing. An old man rested nearby and offered her figs. She ate in silence and never looked away from the wall.

On the second day, she saw it: not a change in the painting itself, but a change in her. She no longer looked for the image—she received it.

By the third day, she began to understand something she had never been taught: that seeing was not always with the eyes, nor was truth always spoken in words. That the forest in the painting was not a place, but a state—a reflection of the self once all noise had been stilled.

On the fifth day, she wept. She did not know why. Only that something within her had unfolded—not painfully, not even joyfully, but gently, as if a knot had released. She stood and placed the blue thread her father had given her at the base of the wall.

‘I have found what cannot be spoken’, she whispered.

From then on, others came to sit where Dionisia had sat. No offerings were demanded, no rites were taught. The mural required nothing but presence. The artisan quarter, though busy, held a reverence that visitors could feel even if they did not understand it.

Some began to call the mural To Ena—The One—not because it was divine, but because it reminded people of what underpinned all things. Not image. Not story, but true essence.

Long after even the oldest rememberers had passed, an unknown hand carved a quiet line at the base of the mural. It read: 'He did not vanish. He saw the world with such clarity that he became what he saw'.

The tale of Epiphanes endured—not because he was famous, nor because he was right, but because he had touched something true. His painting was never finished in paint, but in the way it changed those who came to see it.

That was the great secret. That every eye which gazed into the forest painted it anew, and every soul who looked beyond it walked away seeing a little more clearly—not the forest, not the painter, but themselves.

In time, even the wall around the mural crumbled, but the painting endured. Scholars came to trace its pigments, yet none could explain why it remained untouched by age. No record of the artist’s death was ever found, and no apprentice claimed the work.

Those who came to see it—truly see it—left changed.

Long after names faded and streets were renamed, people still spoke of Epiphanes. Not as a painter, nor a myth, but as a mirror of humanity.

For in learning to see him, they learnt to see themselves—not as they appeared, but as they truly were. They had embraced the Meletic virtues.

Those persons who lingered often spoke in whispers of a presence felt rather than seen—an echo of Epiphanes himself, as if he had become part of the painted forest, forever observing. Some claimed that on quiet nights, when the city slept, faint brushstrokes would shimmer, revealing glimpses of a world just beyond the veil. The mural it seemed was alive in a way no one could fully grasp. It was less a work of art and more a living meditation—inviting all who gazed upon it to embark on their own journey beyond mere sight, into the depths where truth and vision meet.

In the end what was discovered left behind as a remnant of Epiphanes' presence, was the painting that reflected his apparent image. No one ever knew about his whereabouts. He became a legend that would be spoken in the generations that passed.

As the seasons cycled through the city, fewer spoke Epiphanes' name aloud, but the mural remained a part of the soul of Athens. It was not mapped on any tour or etched in any temple, yet somehow, it endured as if protected by the very silence it inspired.

Artists who found themselves lost would come to it—not for answers, but for stillness. They left not with clarity, but with courage. It did not offer direction, but reflection. In that reflection, they found fragments of their own forgotten truths.

Philosophers would occasionally bring their pupils and speak of the ousia, of the inner form beyond appearance, yet more often than not, even they fell silent. The mural taught not through doctrine, but through presence.

One dusk, as the sun bled gold over the hills, a child stood before the painting. He had no name for what he felt, nor any understanding of who the man was meant to be, yet he looked at Epiphanes' painted eyes and smiled, not because he recognised him, but because he felt recognised.

He turned to his mother and said, ‘He’s not in the painting. He’s in me.’

She knelt beside him, moved beyond language. For in that moment, she too understood: the mural was not a relic of a man long gone, but a reflection of what stirred quietly in all who dared to see beyond form.

Thus, the tale became not only about the painter who became the painting—but about those who, in seeing it, began to paint their own truths in the silence of the soul.

In the end, the image remained, but it was no longer his. It was theirs to be witnessed and appreciated.

Years later, when time had occupied much of the city, the mural still stood—unbroken, unweathered. Cracked buildings around it were rebuilt or abandoned, yet the painting remained untouched, as if time itself respected its stillness. Travellers who stumbled upon it by chance often stopped without knowing why. Some knelt. Some cried. Others merely placed a hand upon the warm stone and whispered thanks. No guardian watched over it, for none was needed. The painting guarded itself—not with walls, but with wonder. Through that true wonder, the essence of Epiphanes lived on, not as memory, but as presence.

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