Gnomic poetry

Gnomic poetry consists of meaningful sayings put into verse to aid the memory. They were known by the Greeks as gnomes, from the Greek word for "an opinion".

A gnome was defined by the Elizabethan critic Henry Peacham as "a saying pertaining to the manners and common practices of men, which declareth, with an apt brevity, what in this our life ought to be done, or not done".

It belongs to the broad family of wisdom literature, which expresses general truths about the world. Topics range over the divine and secular, from moral aphorisms to hierarchical social relationships.

The gnomic poets of Greece, who flourished in the 6th century BCE, were those who arranged series of sententious maxims in verse. These were collected in the 4th century, by Lobon of Argos, an orator, but his collection has disappeared. Hesiod's Works and Days is considered to be one of the earliest works of this genre.

The chief gnomic poets were Theognis, Solon, Phocylides, Simonides of Amorgos, Demodocus, Xenophanes and Euenus. With the exception of Theognis, whose gnomes were fortunately preserved by some schoolmaster about 300 BCE, only fragments of the gnomic poets have come down to us. There is at least one known woman gnomic poet, Kassia, of which nearly 789 of her verses survive.

The moral poem attributed to Phocylides, long supposed to be a masterpiece of the school, is now known to have been written by a Jew in Alexandria. Of the gnomic movement typified by the moral works of the poets named above, Gilbert Murray has remarked that it receives its special expression in the conception of the Seven Wise Men, to whom such proverbs as "Know thyself" and "Nothing in excess" were popularly attributed, and whose names differed in different lists.

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