The Tunic Of Sokrates (Η Τουνίκ της Σωκρατικής)

-From The Meletic Tales.

In the waning light of an Athenian afternoon, a young peasant named Philokles wandered along the banks of the Ilissos River. The air was still, thick with the scent of cypress and myrtle, and the waters murmured a rhythm older than the city itself. His hands were stained with olive oil and soil, the toil of his modest labour in a nearby grove.

That day, however, something odd caught his eye beneath a slender fig tree whose roots crept like ancient veins along the shore. There tangled amongst the reeds and half-hidden by a mound of earth, lay a lone tunic—weathered and coarse, its folds stiff with age and river dust. At first, Philokles mistook it for a castoff, the kind scavenged by vagrants, yet something about its simplicity halted him.

He picked it up, brushing off the dirt with a peasant’s care.

In the soft hush of dawn, when the sky was still deciding whether to be grey or gold, Philokles knelt beside a quiet river on the outskirts of Alopece to wash his face. He had risen early to gather reeds for basket weaving—a task dull in purpose, yet necessary for survival.

The water whispered gently along the stones, reflecting the early sun in ribbons of light. It was then the cloth, frayed and silt-stained, but unmistakably shaped into a tunic fell into the water.

He stepped cautiously into the water, the chill biting at his ankles, and retrieved it. It was old, stitched by hand, woven of plain wool—no colours, no markings of station, no decoration at all.

He turned it in his hands, uncertain why it had been left. Perhaps a washerwoman had forgotten it, or a beggar cast it off.

Something in it—the weight of the wool, the looseness of the seams, the quiet familiarity of it—gave Philokles pause.

‘It’s just a mere cloth’, he muttered aloud, shaking his head with incredulity.

Still, he did not cast it aside. He carried it back with his reeds, folded it gently and placed it inside the wooden chest that served both as his table and his storage.

That night, Philokles dreamt not of reeds or silver coins, but of an old man’s voice—calm and deliberate, asking: ‘What is the good, if not that which nourishes the soul?’

He awoke before dawn, his brow damp. His fingers reached for the tunic without thinking.

Philokles asked around the village, but no one claimed it. An old potter, half-blind and always speaking in riddles, stared long at it before mumbling, ‘That belonged to a man who drank death like wine—Sokrates, may the earth remember him’.

Philokles laughed. ‘Sokrates? The philosopher? Why would his tunic be in a river abandoned?’

The potter only shrugged and tapped a wrinkled finger against his temple. ‘Stranger things have floated downstream, young man’.

Word spread—as words always do in villages—and soon others came to look at the memorable tunic. Some scoffed. Others stared at it reverently. One merchant from Athens offered a hundred drachmas.

Philokles considered the offer, more money than he’d earned in moons. He looked at the tunic again, now resting across the chest as if waiting to be returned to thought.

‘It’s just a mere cloth,’ he said again, but softer this time.

In the days that followed, something strange began to take root. Philokles found himself restless. He no longer cared for the idle talk of neighbours, nor the counting of coins. His thoughts wandered.

He remembered the old man’s voice in his dream. ‘To live rightly is to live simply. The wise man owns little, for little owns him’.

Philokles was no philosopher. He had never studied at the academy nor walked amongst the porticoes of the Lyceum, yet something stirred in him—not knowledge, perhaps, but yearning.

He began walking alone along the hills. Listening and thinking.

One morning, he placed the tunic upon his shoulders. The cloth was coarse, but it warmed him in an odd way—not of body, but of mind.

He wore it through the market. People stared.

‘So the peasant thinks himself a sage now’, one man sneered.

‘Or a madman’, another whispered.

Philokles said nothing. He bought no figs. He asked no favours. He simply walked, the tunic about him like a shadow of a thought he had not yet spoken.

A week passed. Then another. The merchant returned, now offering two hundred drachmas and a new cloak. ‘This is more than you’ll earn in a season. Come, young man, don’t be foolish’.

Philokles touched the tunic, folded again in his chest. He looked at the polished boots of the merchant, his heavy rings.

‘What will you do with it?’ He asked.

‘Display it, of course! Put it on a wall in the symposium. Let the guests toast to wisdom. It’ll bring good reputation to this area, by making everyone believe that it had once belonged to Sokrates'.

Philokles frowned. ‘To own a thing that teaches humility, only to use it for pride—what sort of honour is that?’

The merchant scowled. ‘You think you’re clever. You’re still a peasant. That rag won’t feed you’.

Philokles simply closed the door and pondered the words of the merchant.

That night, beneath a moon that bathed the hills in silver, Philokles sat by the river again. The same willow whispered above him. The same water passed, indifferent.

‘Who am I?’ He asked aloud.

No answer came, only the echo of leaves, yet he felt lighter—not because the question was answered, but because it had been asked.

In Athens, a scholar named Aristoppos taught in a quiet courtyard. He had once studied with Sokrates in his youth and still spoke of him as if he’d stepped away only moments ago.

Philokles journeyed there, the tunic folded carefully under his arm.

When he arrived, he waited until the lesson ended, then approached.

‘Are you Aristoppos?’ He asked.

The old man looked up, eyes sharp despite the weight of years. ‘I am’.

Philokles held out the tunic.

‘I found this. Near a riverbank in Alopece. An old man said it belonged to Sokrates’.

Aristoppos took the cloth in silence, his hands trembling. He ran his fingers across the seams, the familiar wear.

‘It is his. He wore this on the day he drank the hemlock. I remember. He gave his better cloak to another student that morning—said this one was more honest’, he said.

He looked at Philokles. ‘How did you come by it?’

‘I found it’, Philokles said. ‘I thought to sell it at first, but… I couldn’t’.

‘Why not?’

Philokles hesitated. Then: ‘Because it taught me something’.

Aristoppos smiled. ‘A tunic that teaches—that reminds people of him’.

Philokles stepped back. ‘It belongs with those persons who remember. I thought perhaps you’d keep it’.

‘You do not wish to profit from it?’

‘No’.

Aristoppos nodded slowly, deeply moved. ‘Then you have understood more than most people have’.

Philokles returned to Alopece with nothing in his hands, yet his gait was straighter. His eyes steadier.

He resumed his weaving. The reeds were still reeds. The work still tedious, but the silence felt different now—less empty, more full.

When the neighbours asked what became of the tunic, he only said, ‘I gave it to someone who listened’.

In time, children gathered at the same willow by the river, listening to Philokles tell stories—not of the tunic, nor of wealth, but of Meletic virtues He had become a Meletic.

He would say: ‘Humility isn’t hiding. It’s seeing clearly. To possess something truly is to know when to let it go’.

They did not always understand, but they remembered the way he spoke — calm and quiet, like a river that moves even when still.

Long after Philokles had gone, they still told the tale.

Of a peasant who found a famous philosopher’s tunic—and, in giving it away, discovered the soul of wisdom.

Seasons turned, and even though Philokles never sought fame, his presence lingered in the minds of many people. Children returned often to the river’s edge, drawn less by entertainment than by the calm presence of a man who seemed to carry something invisible yet unshakable.

He no longer wore the tunic—he never had after giving it away—but he carried something subtler now, something not stitched but instilled. He thought by wearing the tunic it would make him wiser like Sokrates, but his wisdom came not from the tunic, but from his new understanding of life.

One afternoon, as the sun broke through a passing rain, an unfamiliar figure approached Alopece. He was taller than most villagers, cloaked in linen dyed the muted red of the Academy, and he walked with the cautious grace of one who observed rather than assumed. His name was Menandros, a philosopher and former student of Aristoppos, who had heard of Philokles through whispered recollection and quiet reverence.

Menandros found Philokles in the grove, weaving reeds into baskets.

‘Are you the one who gave away Sokrates’ tunic?’ He asked without preamble.

Philokles looked up. ‘If that is how I’m known, then perhaps I am’.

‘I am Menandros. Aristoppos sends his regards. He told me of your gift— and your refusal to sell it, which I think is honourable of you'.

Philokles nodded slowly. ‘The tunic was never mine, only something I came upon. What value it had was in what it asked of me, not what it could buy’.

Menandros studied him for a moment, then crouched beside the reeds.

‘You sound more like a student of the old masters than many I’ve known who studied beneath them’.

Philokles smiled. ‘I only listen to the quietude. It tells me more than shouting ever did’.

For several days, Menandros remained in Alopece. He watched how Philokles lived—waking with the sun, sharing bread with neighbours, speaking only when there was need. In those brief exchanges, villagers confided their small dilemmas—of quarrels, lost crops and hopes unspoken. Philokles rarely gave advice. Instead, he asked a question, then waited for the question to unfold.

‘Why do you worry about how he sees you?’

‘What is the worst that happens if you are wrong?’

‘Can anger last where there is no fuel?’

These questions turned inwards slowly. The villagers, once dismissive of the quiet peasant, began to see him as something else—not a priest, not a teacher, but a mirror.

One evening, as the two men walked the footpaths between the olive trees, Menandros asked, ‘Do you ever regret it? That you did not take the money?’

Philokles paused, then stooped to pick a fallen olive. ‘Had I taken it, I would have gained silver and lost something I hadn’t known I needed. The tunic was like the river—it arrived, changed me and left. I am no poorer for that’.

Menandros looked away, his eyes misted. ‘Aristoppos passed three days ago. Peacefully, in his sleep’.

Philokles stood still, then placed the olive gently upon a stone. ‘He held the tunic at the end?’

‘He did. It lay folded beside him. He said it reminded him of why he first followed Sokrates. Of clarity. Of release’.

They walked in silence.

That night, Philokles lit a small oil lamp and sat beneath the stars. The wind rustled the reeds outside. He thought not of the past, but of the continuation —of others who might carry stillness where noise had reigned.

The next morning, he surprised the village. He stood at the centre of the square with a single basket—unlike the others he made—adorned with a loop of olive bark and shaped not to hold but to rest upon the head.

‘This is for the child who listens most’, he said.

The children stood stunned.

‘Not the smartest nor the strongest—the one who listens’, he clarified.

Each week he repeated the practice, asking them what they had heard—not from people, but from the sky, from the fields, from silence itself. One boy, called Alexandros, once said, ‘I heard the trees argue when the wind blew, but they agreed again when it passed’.

Philokles gave him the basket and said, ‘Then you have heard yourself in them’.

The years passed. Menandros returned to Athens, where he wrote of a peasant in Alopece whose wisdom was quieter than a scroll but heavier in the hand. His students, eager for doctrine, were puzzled. ‘What did he teach?’ They asked.

Menandros only smiled. ‘He asked, then let the answer come to you’.

In time, others came. Not many. Just enough. They did not call Philokles a sage or a seer. They called him, The one who listens. Philokles never corrected them.

Near the end of his life, as the fig trees bore fruit heavy and sweet, Philokles lay beneath the same willow by the river. His breaths were few, but not laboured. A child—grown now, but once a listener—sat beside him.

‘What should we remember, Philokles?’ He asked.

Philokles, eyes closed, whispered, ‘That nothing truly owned is ever held, and that truth is not something found—only revealed when you stop grasping’.

He smiled once, then did not speak again. They buried him beside the river, near the place the tunic had once lain.

No stone was placed. Only reeds, woven into the shape of a simple tunic, left upon the water. It drifted gently downstream—a quiet echo of presence, not possession.

The months folded into years, and Philokles’ name faded from records, as names so often do, but his presence lingered—not in stone, nor inscription, but in the way certain villagers chose to walk softly beneath olive trees, or pause beside a river, not to speak, but to listen.

The basket practice continued for a generation, and then another. Its shape changed—no longer olive bark, but vine or laurel—yet the intention remained: to reward the child who listened best. Over time, the question changed too. No longer, 'What did you hear?' but 'What did you understand without words?'

In the shade of that same willow tree, elders still gathered children, not to teach, but to wonder aloud. They spoke of a man who had once found a worn tunic by the river, a tunic belonging to a philosopher who drank hemlock without fear—and how that same cloth had stirred a peasant not toward greatness, but towards consciousness.

Most children heard the tale as just that: a fable, a story told to pass the afternoon, but some—a few—carried it differently. They began to observe more keenly: the way fig leaves trembled before a storm, the hush before a neighbour spoke hard truth, the spaces between people’s words.

Occasionally, when no one was looking, they walked alone to the river, sat beneath the willow, and said nothing at all.

Far from Alopece, in the learnt halls of Athens and the quieter schools beyond, the name Philokles surfaced in footnotes, letters and conversations amongst philosophers. Menandros had written sparingly, as was his habit, but with care. One scroll, titled The quiet teacher, described a man who, by doing nothing remarkable, had become a vessel for reflection.

‘He gave away what others sought to own, and in that gesture taught what cannot be sold, which is presence', the scroll read.

Some people dismissed the story as idealised rusticism—yet others, secretly, found in it a kind of medicine. In a world of disputation and spectacle, here was a man who embodied what Meleticism would later call the dignity of humility—the grace in letting go, not from defeat, but from understanding.

When the scroll was read aloud at the Lyceum, a student once asked, ‘What was his doctrine?’

The lecturer, a grey-haired philosopher who had visited Alopece in youth, smiled faintly and said, ‘He asked questions. Then waited. That was enough’.

Back in the village, the river changed course slightly over the decades, carving new banks and swallowing parts of the old. The willow tree grew broader, even though part of it split after a lightning storm and leaned towards the water, as if bowing.

It was beneath this tree, many years later, that a young girl named Ismene found something half-buried in the soil after a heavy rain. It was not the tunic —that had long returned to dust—but a piece of clay pressed into a disk, faintly etched with two lines: a stylised reed and a hand letting go. No one knew who had made it.

Ismene kept it for years, not as treasure, but as reminder. When she grew old, she passed it on to her grandson, saying only, ‘Hold this not for what it is, but for what it means’.

Thus, the silence remained. Not forgotten—only lived. Not written—only remembered.

In the folds of the earth and the current of the river, the question lingered still: 'What do we carry that was never ours in the first place—and when shall we finally let it go?'

In that way, as Meleticism quietly insists: what is lost in form may still be present in essence.

Even centuries later, when Delphi lay half-buried beneath wildflowers and memory, travellers would pause by a weathered pine and feel something they could not name. They would rest their hands upon its bark and listen — not to voices, but to something quieter: the stillness within.

If they stayed long enough, they, too, might begin to wonder—not about the papyrus, nor Platon, nor philosophy—but about the weightless thread that connects all things.

The One had not vanished. It had only moved where words could no longer follow—into presence itself. Into being.

And so, long after names faded and scrolls turned to dust, the One continued—not in monuments or doctrine, but in the breath between thoughts, in the choice to listen, and in the courage to let go and embrace fate.

In that silence, something lived—not as a voice, but as a rhythm. The soft awareness that what matters most often arrives without announcement: a pause, a glance, a leaf turning in the breeze.

Those people who came to Delphi seeking wisdom no longer asked for teachings. They brought offerings of stillness—a woven reed, a small stone, a line of verse unfinished.

They sat where Ismene had once sat. Not to remember her, but to remember themselves.

In those quiet moments, To Ena, the One was present—not as a truth declared, but as a truth felt, softly and completely.

The One, like the river’s flow, could not be held or captured—only experienced, and those people who lived with this knowing found peace not in answers, but in the eternal question itself.

Recommend Write a ReviewReport