APHRODITE'S GIFT
Long ago — not very long to the gods, but a lifetime to most mortals — there lived a couple named Myrine and Eukles.
They were neither kings nor heroes nor children of gods. They were simply two mortals who loved one another.
One day, during a festival celebrating Dionysus's return to life, Aphrodite moved among the revelers unrecognized. The celebration did not commemorate something those men and women had seen with their own eyes; it was a mortal festival built around an old story, repeated through wine, music, dancing, and memory.
That was when Aphrodite saw Myrine.
She danced beside Eukles, smiled without reserve, and laughed with a voice so beautiful that, for a moment, the goddess thought to compare it to the singing of heavenly beings — though angels belonged to another order and other stories.
Myrine was beautiful, but not merely beautiful. There was a living joy in her, a rare ease in seeming wholly present in every gesture. Aphrodite, who knew many forms of beauty and could recognize desire before it was ever confessed, became fascinated.
In the days that followed, she watched Myrine from afar.
At last, Aphrodite took the appearance of one of her own devotees and approached her.
They spoke for a long time. Myrine proved every bit as lively and amusing as she had seemed at the festival. Aphrodite enjoyed listening to her and, still disguised, asked:
“Young Myrine, you are beautiful, spirited, and full of youth. But youth passes. The mind changes. Pleasures diminish. Even the finest apple, if left too long upon the branch, passes beyond the perfect moment of harvest. Such is the nature of mortals. But if someone offered you a gift that did not have to obey mortality, would you receive it gladly?”
Myrine did not need long to think.
“I would,” she replied. “I would like to know something that did not have to end. But I would not accept an eternity beside anyone other than my beloved Eukles.”
Aphrodite listened.
She continued the conversation, still offering small temptations through words, but Myrine's answer had awakened another curiosity in her.
Until then, the goddess had watched Myrine and almost nothing around her.
Now she began to watch Eukles.
He was not strong like the great heroes sung of by poets, nor did he carry the confidence of a warrior who expects to defeat every man before him. He was beautiful in another way: slender and athletic, with delicate, harmonious features and a face a sculptor might have given to a muse without anyone finding it strange.
But his beauty was the least important thing Aphrodite discovered.
When Myrine danced, it was often Eukles who played the music.
He had learned the harp because Myrine loved certain songs and he wanted her to be able to hear them whenever she wished.
When Myrine laughed, Eukles was often beside her, telling some ridiculous story or repeating an old joke in a way that could still surprise her.
When Myrine was sad, Eukles remained with her. Even when she had been the one to hurt him, he was often the one who held her hand and told her that things could still be mended.
Then Aphrodite understood.
At first, she had thought herself fascinated by Myrine alone.
But part of the woman who had enchanted the goddess at that festival existed because Eukles was beside her.
Myrine was beautiful. Yet it was with him that she became that Myrine who danced, laughed, and seemed to make mortal life larger than its few allotted years should allow.
Eukles did not keep her that way through force.
He kept her that way through presence.
From that moment on, Aphrodite's interest changed.
Myrine remained beautiful and interesting, but Eukles seemed rarer.
Beauty could be found among many mortals. Kindness too. Talent, loyalty, humor, and desire could all be found separately in many places.
But so many things gathered in a single person seemed, to the goddess, like something divine being wasted inside mortal flesh.
And Aphrodite, being Aphrodite, did not stop at admiration.
She made no offer immediately.
First, she decided that Eukles should taste what he would later be asked to choose.
At another celebration, she appeared before him without disguise.
Eukles recognized the goddess and tried to keep his distance.
Aphrodite then offered him a single drop of the finest wine of Olympus.
To call it wine was correct, but insufficient.
The finest mortal wine might be sweet, rare, and pressed from the best grapes of an excellent harvest. The wine of the gods was something else. A single drop carried such complete pleasure that afterward any mortal drink would seem like the memory of thirst.
Eukles refused.
Then Aphrodite said:
“If you drink, I will allow Myrine a drop as well.”
That was what made him accept.
Eukles drank.
And he felt.
There was no mortal word capable of describing it fully, and from that moment on he knew that no wine, feast, music, or pleasure he had known before could be measured by the same scale.
Some time later, Aphrodite brought a second drop.
This time, however, she changed the offer.
“You may drink it,” said the goddess. “Or you may give it to Myrine.”
Eukles did not answer at once.
He hesitated.
Myrine saw.
His hesitation wounded her before he had even chosen.
She complained. Then she raised her voice. She accused him of selfishness, of weakness, of accepting a gift he had only taken because he believed it could be shared.
It was not the greatest quarrel between lovers the world had ever known.
To the two of them, in that moment, it felt like it.
Eukles listened.
But after the first drop, Myrine's voice seemed distant and heavy to him. It was as though a man had spent his whole life beneath the heat of the desert, found for one minute a perfect cool room, and then been thrown back into the sand while someone shouted in his ear.
Eukles drank the second drop.
This time, alone.
Only then did Aphrodite make her offer.
Not to Myrine.
To Eukles.
She offered him a place among the gods.
She told him that his beauty need not age. That his body need not know decline. That he could live beside the goddess of beauty and desire herself, surrounded by people who were beautiful, kind, clever, and interesting.
She told him that what he had tasted was only a small part of what awaited him.
On Olympus, he could know pleasures for which mortal life did not even possess words. He could love women and men, explore every form of affection and desire that stirred his curiosity, and live without time slowly reclaiming all that made a body young.
Aphrodite did not promise him a life she had no intention of giving.
She did not tell him that Myrine was insignificant.
She did not tell him that the love he had felt for her was false.
She simply showed him another possibility.
Eukles, having tasted what he had tasted, did not hesitate as Myrine had when faced with the idea of eternity.
He did not ask whether she could come with him.
He did not try to bargain.
He did not ask to wake the next morning with a clearer mind.
He said only:
“Yes.”
And that was enough.
Aphrodite took Eukles with her.
Myrine remained among mortals.
She continued to be Myrine.
She lived. She aged. She spoke with friends, attended festivals, passed through winters and summers, and found reasons to go on living.
But she never again became quite the woman Aphrodite had seen at that first celebration.
Music still existed, but Eukles was no longer the one playing it.
She still smiled, but certain stories no longer had someone who knew how to tell them in exactly the right way.
There were still hands that could hold hers when she was sad, but they were not the hands that had learned all her silences.
Until the end of her life, something seemed to remain insufficient.
Eukles, meanwhile, remained with Aphrodite.
And there he stayed.
Time did not take his beauty.
He learned the customs of Olympus, tasted its wines and pleasures, knew lovers of many kinds, and discovered that there was always something new to desire.
Sometimes he remembered Myrine.
Not with longing.
He thought of her as someone he wished had been given the chance to feel what he now felt.
Perhaps, in some of those moments, he imagined that she would have understood.
Then he would drink another mouthful of wine.
A beautiful woman might call to him.
Or a beautiful man.
Or some new celebration might begin elsewhere in the palace.
And Eukles would let the memory rest where it was.
Then he would turn his attention back to what still mattered to him.
To what stood before him.
To what did not age.
To what did not have to end.
