Final Paper

The First Love Song

Plato’s Eryximachus once theorized that we were once twice the people we are now, and because we were double in strength and intelligence we were a threat to the gods. Zeus had a plan however, to put us in our place and make us humble. Instead of destroying us all together, he cut us in half, which diminished our strength and multiplied us into greater numbers serving to be more profitable to the gods, anyway. But the splitting of our bodies had a more powerful effect on our souls than was probably intended. The consequence being that we are forever in search of our other half and only when we find the other half to our body will our soul be complete again, and that is love. This story comes from Plato’s Symposium and there are a number of other theories of what love is and how we should regard it, but there was one story that Plato forgot to include. There was another attendant at this particular symposium that had her own theory of what love is and where it came from, her name was Aglaia, and she was nothing more than a servant girl who tented to the tedious demand of a room full of drunken, half naked, preaching men. But Aglaia knew something about love that these old men did not. For, when she was a little girl and there were no toys to play with or time to waste she would help her mother dig and bury seeds in the rich soil of the garden. There was very rarely any dialogue between Aglaia and her mother, but her mother had the most beautiful voice in their village and she always sang as they worked side by side. Those songs that her mother sang used to fill her with such an immense joy that sometimes a tear would escape from her olive eye and roll gently down her cheek, not from any sense of distress, but from a kind of pure happiness . It was a combination of the beauty of the song and who it was coming from that created the love that Aglaia had for her mother.
One day when Aglaia and her mother were confined indoors because the rain was hounding down like small spears from the sky, Aglaia’s mother noticed one tear fall from her daughter’s eye. She cut short her song and asked Aglaia what was the matter. When Aglaia answered that her mother’s song had filled her with an overwhelming sense of joy, her mother smiled and asked her if she wanted to know why that happened. Aglaia nodded and the two went to sit on a folded blanket near the window. Aglaia’s mother began by telling her that the goddess Aphrodite once had a daughter whom she called Musea. But this daughter was never very well known among the gods or the people because Aphrodite had been expecting a son and was so disappointed with a daughter that she threw Musea from the clouds and proceeded to forget all about her. But Hephaestus had watched what Aphrodite had done and being that he was the father of Musea, he planted a volcano where Musea was falling, and because she was the offspring of the god of fire she did not burn or even feel pain when she fell into the burning lava. Instead she floated to the top and gradually slid down to the base of the volcano where she was found and raised by mortals. The older Musea grew, the more beautiful she became and like any youthful girl she found herself very interested in one particular young man. As they grew to be closer and the best of friends they fell madly in love with each other and never left the other’s side. One day, a very dreadful day, a neighboring village invaded their village burned down their houses and stole away the strongest men for their own armies. In the depths of that disaster, Musea’s love was torn from her arms and carried away to be enslaved in a land she could not find. Musea’s heart was broken, and she vowed to spend the rest of her life searching until she found her true love or until she died. Musea had been taught from the people who had adopted her that sometime if you prayed and worshiped to the gods and goddesses hard enough that sometimes they would help you. Knowing that this was a matter of love she fled to the nearest and the highest temple of Aphrodite to sacrifice a stag and beg on her knees for help. But little did Musea know, Aphrodite was her mother and little did Aphrodite know that Musea was still alive.
As Aphrodite sat in her throne in the heavens watching all the people in her temples praise her, she was particularly drawn to one girl’s face, it was familiar, like she had seen those eyes before. Though, that must be impossible she thought to herself, but I have nothing better to do so I shall see what this mortal wants of me, and she floated down to stand before Musea in all her glory. Once Aphrodite was in her daughters presence she knew immediately who this woman was, and watching her daughter cry before her asking her to help her find her true love, Aphrodite felt guilt and she pitied Musea who did not even know that she was a goddess. However, instead of telling Musea that she was her daughter; Aphrodite decided to help her daughter find this true love, though she doubted that it was anything more than young lust. She called up to the gods in heaven to look down on the earth and find her daughter’s lover. When he had been sighted Aphrodite took her to just outside where her lover was. Musea thanked Aphrodite with a tear in her eye and Aphrodite left thinking she had set things right.
Musea’s heart pounded harder than usual, sweat beaded up on her forehead and her hands shook a little, but she walked on anyway. Their eyes met in a courtyard, locked and without blinking they ran to each other, embraced and kissed. This was their first real kiss and it filled Musea with such a joy that her vocal cords began to ring, and she burst out in the very first love song. Musea sang and sang until you would think there was no more air in her lungs, but she kept singing and it was a beautiful song. Gradually, her body had begun to tingle like when you first step out from your warm house into the winter air and she felt light like she wasn’t touching the ground, and she wasn’t. As the song came to an end her body burst into a thousand beads of colored light and for the first and only time in the history of the world people saw what music looked like and it was more beautiful than any art the human hand could ever produce. When the beads of light had flickered out, there was nothing left but the resonance of the very first love song in everybody’s heart and it filled them with joy. That feeling of joy is aroused now by two things and two things alone, a beautiful song and love and you know you love someone when you get the same feeling that you get from a beautiful song.
Music is the one force that is present in everyone’s life, just like love, and they both invoke the same feeling all because the daughter of love exploded into song. Since then, Aglaia had heard many beautiful songs and each one that reminded her of her mother left her with that clenched heart, that skip in her step and that smile on her face. She leaned against the door to the kitchen in Agathon’s house and thought back to that rainy day when she found out how to recognize love and how true it was. She had had a few romances but no one had made her heart fill with the same joy as her mother’s songs, until she met the man she was now married to. Aglaia may not have told those men of great importance and stature how to truly recognize real love, but she smiled to herself anyway and went to get Aristophanes a feather to tickle his nose.