Gnomic Poetry - Ancient Greek Gnomic Literature

Ancient Greek Gnomic Literature

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.

These gnomes or maxims were extended and put into literary shape by the poets. Fragments of Solon, Euenus and Mimnermus have been preserved, in a very confused state, from having been written, for purposes of comparison, on the margins of the manuscripts of Theognis, whence they have often slipped into the text of that poet. Theognis enshrines his moral precepts in his elegies, and this was probably the custom of the rest; it is improbable that there ever existed a species of poetry made up entirely of successive gnomes. But the title gnomic came to be given to all poetry which dealt in a sententious way with questions of ethics. It was, unquestionably, the source from which moral philosophy was directly developed, and theorists upon life and infinity, such as Pythagoras and Xenophanes, seem to have begun their career as gnomic poets.

Gnomes, in their literary sense, belong to the dawn of literature, in their naiveté and their simplicity and moralizing. Many of the ethical reflections of the great dramatists, and in particular of Sophocles and Euripides, are gnomic distiches expanded. The ancient Greek gnomes are not all solemn; some are voluptuous and some chivalrous. Those of Demodocus of Leros had the reputation of being droll.

J. A. Symonds writes that the Gnomic Poets mark a transition from Homer and Hesiod to the dramatists and moralists of Attica.