Delphic Maxims Study Portal

TL;DR

The Delphic maxims are short imperatives that stood in the forecourt of Apollo's temple at Delphi, addressed to ordinary people walking in to consult the oracle. The three famous ones — gnothi seauton (know thyself), meden agan (nothing in excess) and engya, para d'ate (give a pledge and ruin is at hand) — are popular ethics carved in a public place, not an esoteric doctrine, and the mundanity of the third is the interpretive key to the other two. "Know thyself" in its archaic sense is not an invitation to introspection but a reminder of mortal limit: know that you are a man and not a god. Only later, through Socrates and the Platonic Alcibiades I, does it become the programme of self-examination the phrase now names. A longer list of roughly 147 such maxims survives in Stobaeus, attributed to the Seven Sages; a version of it was carved 5,000 km east at Ai-Khanoum on the Oxus, brought there — the inscription says — by a man named Clearchus, very probably Clearchus of Soli in Cyprus.