The Torch Of Anaxagoras (Η Δάδα του Αναξαγόρα)

-From The Meletic Tales.

The breeze that swept across the hills of Lampsacus carried with it the scent of olive groves and the distant hush of the sea. The sun, having begun its descent, turned the sky a shade of rust and gold, casting long shadows across the worn path where young Sophokles wandered alone.

He had always felt drawn to the cliffs beyond the vineyards, to the quiet caverns said to harbour whispers from the time of the ancients. Whilst others in his village were content with trade or toil, Sophokles had an insatiable hunger—for meaning, for the unseen truths beneath the surface of the world. He had no actual name for this yearning, only a sense that something waited for him, hidden not in gold or fame, but in understanding.

It was on such an afternoon, as he strayed from the goat trails into the cool shadows of a rockfall, that he saw it.

Wedged amongst limestone boulders and covered in ages of dust was a piece of charred wood, remarkably preserved despite its age. It had the distinct shape of a handled torch—its tip blackened, yet its base carved with intricate spirals. Sophokles knelt before it and ran his fingers along the grooves.

‘What are you?’ What are you doing here? He whispered.

He pulled the torch gently from the rubble, and for a moment, it seemed to hum faintly in his grasp. Something about it stirred the back of his mind, like a dream half-remembered.

The following morning, with the ancient wood wrapped carefully in cloth, Sophokles made his way into the heart of Lampsacus. There lived an old man on the edge of the city, known by the name of Erastos. Some people said he was mad, a hermit who stared too long into the sun. Others claimed he was once a philosopher of great renown who had studied under those who knew the wise men of Athens.

Sophokles found him in the courtyard of a modest house, seated cross-legged beneath a pomegranate tree. His beard, white and tangled, fell to his chest, and his eyes—although aged—held a clarity that startled the young man.

‘You’ve come with something in your hands, but more in your soul’, said Erastos before Sophokles could speak.

The youth unwrapped the torch and laid it before the old man.

Erastos' gaze fell upon it, and his breath caught. ‘By the Nous…’

‘You recognise it?’ Sophokles asked, his voice edged with disbelief.

Erastos nodded slowly. ‘I do. I have not seen it since I was a boy. A great man once held it—Anaxagoras of Klazomenai. This… this is his torch’.

Sophokles stared at it, then back at the old man. ‘How can it be? That was… long ago’.

‘Time does not always swallow the things that matter’, Eratos said, lifting the torch with reverence. ‘This was not a mere tool for fire. It symbolised his thought—his burning search for truth, his illumination of what others feared to question. He would speak of the Nous while holding it… the ordering force of all things’.

‘The Nous?’

Erastos looked up. ‘Come back tomorrow. Bring no questions—only silence. I will tell you what the torch still remembers’.

Thus, began the days of learning. Each morning, Sophokles returned to sit at the feet of Erastos, who spoke not in riddles, but with calm precision, his words rooted in a philosophy that pulsed with clarity.

‘Anaxagoras taught that everything was in everything. ‘That what we call separation is illusion. All things existed in a primordial mixture, until the Nous set them into motion—an eternal intelligence that caused order from chaos’, he explained one morning.

‘Is it a god?’ Sophokles asked.

Erastos shook his head. ‘Not as people imagine gods. The Nous is not an idol or spirit. It is the guiding shape, impersonal yet present. It is what sees the whole whilst we see only the parts’.

Sophokles furrowed his brow. ‘What does that mean for us?’

‘It means we are not fragments lost in darkness. Within us is a thread of the Nous. To understand ourselves is to touch the order beneath the disorder. To live rightly, we must observe, think and meditate’.

Under Erastos’ guidance, Sophokles learnt to sit in silence, to listen not merely with his ears, but with his being. He learnt the Meletic way—not a religion, but a discipline of awareness, rooted in the belief that the cosmos was not ruled by chance but by an unfolding harmony that was the Logos.

The torch, kept always at Erastos’ side, became more than an artefact. It seemed to glow subtly when lessons deepened. Its carved spirals, once seen as decoration, revealed a pattern of movement, like a map of thought itself.

One evening, as twilight painted the world in violet and dusk, Sophokles posed a question that had long brewed in his heart.

‘If the Nous orders all things, do we have any choice? Or are we just drifting leaves in its current?’

Erastos smiled. ‘Ah. The dilemma of freedom. Choice exists, but not in defiance of the Nous. Rather, it is in recognising the order and choosing to align with it. Like a sailor who studies the stars—not to control them, but to navigate by them’.

Sophokles felt a deep stillness in his chest. It was the beginning of an answer he had always sought, but never known how to ask.

In the months that followed, Sophokles withdrew more from the noise of the market, from the chatter of idle minds. He began to write and to meditate beside the old philosopher. He would climb the hills not for adventure, but for contemplation. In the rustling of the trees, the movement of the stars, and the rhythm of the sea, he began to feel the Nous—not as a voice, but as a presence. A certain knowing. He began to understand as well the Logos and To Ena, the One.

‘You are becoming a philosopher’, Erastos said one day, his voice touched with both pride and fatigue. ‘Not in words, but in the soul’.

‘What then?’ Sophokles asked.

Erastos placed the torch into the young man’s hands. ‘Then you carry this. Not because it belonged to Anaxagoras, but because now, it belongs to you’.

Sophokles felt the weight of the torch, not merely as wood, but as responsibility. The fire it once carried had long since faded, but its purpose had not.

As the years passed. Erastos died in his sleep beneath the same pomegranate tree where he had first greeted Sophokles. The people of Lampsacus gave him no grand funeral, only the silence he had taught others to revere. Sophokles buried him near the cave where he had first found the torch, marking the stone with two words: The Nous.

Sophokles did not remain in Lampsacus. He walked eastwards, across the isles and hills, through the cities where philosophy was theatre and virtue was rare.

In every place he went, he brought the torch—not to preach, but to listen and to teach quietly, to those people who still hungered for meaning. He taught not dogma, but a way of seeing: to observe nature, to contemplate stillness, to align with the harmony of existence.

People came to call him ‘Sophokles the quiet flame’. They said his torch never burnt with fire, but that his presence kindled something in others—a yearning to know, to understand, to become.

Decades later, a child walked amongst the trees near Lampsacus, where the wildflowers still bloomed beside old stones. He found a man sitting in meditation near the same rock upon which the name the Nous was etched.

‘Are you the one with the torch?’ The child asked.

The man opened his eyes. Hair grey, hands weathered, but eyes just as steady. 'Once. Now I am simply Sophokles’.

The child looked down. ‘What is the torch?’

Sophokles smiled. ‘A reminder. That in each of us burns a light—not made of fire, but of understanding’.

‘And the Nous?’

He reached into his satchel and withdrew a smooth stone etched with spirals—the same patterns carved on the old torch, now long gone.

‘The Nous is what forms the stars and stirs your thoughts. It is what made you ask that question, and it will be what guides your search for its answer’.

He placed the stone in the boy’s hand. ‘How do I find it?’ The child asked.

Sophokles closed his eyes. ‘Observe life. Study what you see. Then think about what it means’.

Under the starlit sky of Lampsacus, where ancient wisdom met the quiet yearning of the soul, the Meletic path continued—torchless, yet ever lit.

The years drifted like petals on a stream. Sophokles, once the youth who unearthed an ancient relic had been the quiet elder whose presence was known along the Ionian coast, from Teos to Mytilene, and even amongst certain secluded hills of Lydia. He travelled lightly, carrying no possessions save a leather satchel filled with scrolls, herbs, and a single stone carved with spirals—the only remnant of the torch that had changed his life.

Even though he no longer taught in structured assemblies, nor sought crowds, students still found him.

One such youth was a girl named Eulalia, daughter of a shipbuilder from Erythrae. She was sharp of tongue and sharp of eye, with little patience for mystery but a deep wound she hid behind cleverness. She encountered Sophokles during one of his quiet vigils along the olive terraces.

‘Are you the philosopher who never speaks unless the wind does first?’ She asked with a smirk.

Sophokles turned to her with a calm smile. ‘And are you the seeker who insults what she secretly yearns to know?’

She flushed. ‘I do not yearn for anything’.

‘Then why have you come all this way to ask a silent man about his silence?’

Her reply was a scowl, but she sat beside him all the same.

For many days, Eulalia returned to that spot beneath the olive tree. She asked questions, some pointed, some mocking, but Sophokles answered only a few—enough to keep her wondering, not enough to satisfy.

Finally, on the seventh day, she asked him with audacity, ‘Why will you not simply tell me what you believe?’

He opened one eye. ‘Because belief is not truth. You must see, not hear’.

She stood abruptly, ready to leave in frustration—but something in her hesitated. There was no derision in his voice, no smugness. Only the patience of a man who had once asked the same thing and found that silence carried more meaning than speech.

‘What do you mean by see?’ She asked, quieter this time.

Sophokles gestured towards the sea beyond the hills. ‘Do you see the horizon ahead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Describe it with words.’

‘It is where the sky meets the sea. A line. It moves when I move’.

‘Does it truly exist?’

She frowned. ‘Yes. I see it clearly’.

‘If you sail towards it, you never reach it. It always stays ahead. It is a meeting of seeming, not substance’.

Eulalia looked at him sideways. ‘So you’re saying truth is like the horizon?’

‘No. I’m saying you are like the one who chases it, not knowing it’s already within you’.

She blinked. Her gaze dropped to the stone he held in his hand.

‘The spiral… why does it always return to itself?’

‘Because that is the motion of all true seeking. Outwards from self. Inwards to self. The Nous flows through it all’, he told her.

In time, Eulalia remained not just as a student, but as a companion in learning. She grew into her questions, learning not to rush them. She would walk ahead of Sophokles on narrow paths, only to stop and wait for his silent stride. She began to write poetry inspired by the Logos, the Nous and To Ena. She also began to teach younger children by the wells and fig trees of her town.

One evening, she found Sophokles sitting beside a stream, eyes closed, a look of great stillness on his face.

‘I had a dream,’ she said softly.

He opened his eyes. ‘What kind of dream?’

‘I dreamt I was falling into darkness, but then I remembered your words about the Nous, and suddenly I saw light. It was not coming towards me. It was coming from me. Does that mean something?’

Sophokles smiled gently. ‘You have begun to remember what your soul has always known. The Nous does not impose. It emanates. When the soul aligns with its flow, it becomes luminous.’

Eulalia sat beside him. ‘Why do so few feel it? Why do people chase shadows when the torch is within?’

He leaned back on the grass and exhaled. ‘Because the world is loud, and the Nous is quiet. Most people follow echoes. They do not yet know how to listen for the original voice’.

She closed her eyes, letting the stream’s sound fill the silence. 'Shall I ever understand it fully?’

‘Perhaps not, but even to seek is to participate in its flow. And that… is enough’, he responded.

In the twilight of his life, Sophokles returned one last time to Lampsacus.

He moved slowly now, leaning on a carved staff. His face had lines like wind-marked stone, and yet his eyes remained clear, like water undisturbed. He found the cave where he had first discovered the torch and sat at its mouth for three days and nights, fasting, remembering.

Children from the nearby village watched from a distance. They whispered tales of the old man who spoke to the earth. One brave boy approached on the final evening. ‘Sir’, he said, clutching a reed flute in his hand, ‘are you waiting for someone?’

Sophokles looked up. ‘Not someone. Something’.

‘What?’

He gestured to the stars above. ‘The alignment. Of mind, body and soul. The hush before the flow. The gate that opens when you no longer seek to open it with desires’.

The boy sat cross-legged, curious but confused.

Sophokles handed him the spiral stone. ‘This once belonged to a torch, and the torch belonged to a thinker named Anaxagoras, but the flame he lit was not fire—it was thought. Take this. Let it remind you to observe more than you assume. To wonder more than you conclude’.

‘But what if I forget?’

‘Then the spiral will remind you. All journeys curve back to their beginning. What matters is that you walk with eyes open’.

Eulalia returned a week later, only to find Sophokles gone. In the cave, she discovered a scroll left for her.

It read: 'To see is not to conquer, but to connect.
To think is not to master, but to mirror the Nous within.
You are not a keeper of answers, but a carrier of the flame.
Let it light quietly, and others will follow its warmth'.

Beneath it lay the carved staff. Not a weapon. A guide. Eulalia took it in her hands, tears rising. She did not mourn. She listened—to the birds, the waves, the cave wind—and understood that he had returned not to end, but to become part of the spiral.

Years later, travellers across Ionia spoke of a woman who taught not in forums, but in forests and fields. She carried no torch, but her presence stirred the minds of even the most jaded cynics. Children were drawn to her, elders respected her, and seekers sat at her feet.

She was known as Eulalia of the spiral path.

When asked what she believed, she would answer: ‘I believe that the Nous lives in all things, and that each of us carries a hidden torch—not to shine above others, but to find our way through the darkness that blinds us’.

Sometimes, she would show them the spiral stone and say, ‘This is all that remains of a great torch, but even that is enough’.

In this way, the flame of Anaxagoras, kindled by Sophokles and carried by Eulalia, passed silently from soul to soul—not in temples or decrees, but in quiet moments of thought, in silent walks beside rivers, in dreams where the light emerges from it.

The original essence of the torch that once belonged to Anaxagoras remained in the teachings of the Nous, which is the eternal flame that the Logos manifests.

There came a time when Eulalia, too, felt her steps slow, her nights deepen, her breath lengthen between thoughts. She had walked the spiral path for many decades, and even though she had never sought disciples, seekers came nonetheless. Some people stayed a season, others a lifetime, but all of them remembered one thing—her silence was never empty. It carried presence.

She settled at last by a small grove not far from the bay where Sophokles once watched the stars. There, beneath a canopy of fig and myrtle, she built nothing permanent—only stone circles, wind chimes made of shell, and a bench carved with the words: To know is to return to stillness.

Amongst her final students was a young woman named Aretha, a stargazer who had once dismissed all things unmeasured as fantasy. But after weeks under Eulalia’s quiet guidance, she began to glimpse something deeper than certainty—an intelligence behind the weave of things.

‘How shall I know I’ve understood the Nous?’ she asked one day.

Eulalia replied, barely above a whisper, ‘When you no longer need to ask that question.’

On her final morning, Eulalia walked barefoot to the sea. She stood still, arms at her side, eyes open to the horizon. No words. No ceremony. Only presence.

And long after she was gone, beneath that grove of fig and myrtle, a new circle formed. People did not come to worship, nor to follow—they came to sit, to contemplate and to begin again.

For the torch, although no longer seen, still burnt—quietly, within them.

The story of the torch became a lasting whisper carried on the winds of Lampsacus. It was not told in grand halls, but shared in fleeting moments—between parent and child, in the hush of dawn, or beneath the glow of a single candle.

It was said that those people who truly sought the torch did not find it as a thing, but as a flame awakened within themselves. And so the legacy of Anaxagoras, Erastos, and Eulalia lived on—not in monuments or scrolls, but in the steady quiet light of countless souls learning to see, to think, and to be.

The torch was never lost. It was never extinguished. It simply passed on from one generation to another.

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