Delphic Maxims Study Portal

Key takeaways

• The maxims are popular ethics inscribed in a public place at a panhellenic sanctuary, addressed to ordinary visitors — not an esoteric doctrine and not the compressed axioms of a system.
• The traditional three are gnothi seauton, meden agan and engya, para d'ate; the third is literal advice against standing surety, and its mundanity fixes the register of the whole set.
• "Know thyself" originally meant "know that you are mortal and not a god" — a warning against hybris. The introspective reading is a later acquisition via Socrates and Alcibiades I, and most modern quotation silently swaps the two senses.
• The archaic sequence is hybris → nemesis → ate, and sophrosyne is the positive virtue that meden agan points at. The maxims are unintelligible without that vocabulary.
• Attribution to the Seven Sages is traditional, not documented — the list's membership varies around a stable core of Thales, Solon, Bias and Pittacus, which is what an authority-claim looks like rather than a record.
• The long list of ~147 maxims reaches us through Stobaeus in the fifth century AD; it has a far weaker claim to the temple than the famous three.
• At Ai-Khanoum on the Oxus, an inscription records Delphic maxims copied at Delphi by Clearchus — very probably Clearchus of Soli, Cyprus. Probable, not certain. With Zeno of Citium founding the Stoa, Cyprus is a hinge in the distribution of Greek thought, not a footnote.
• Heraclitus B93 — the lord at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign — is the best description of how a maxim works.
• A maxim trades completeness for retrievability: no scope, no adjudication between conflicting maxims, and unearned finality. Use it as a handle for reasoning you have already done.