Gnomic Poets, Greek poets, as Theognis and Solon, of the sixth century B.
A city long famous as the seat of elegiac and gnomic poetry.
A miscellaneous collection of riddles, charms, gnomic verses, and "oddments" of different kinds.
The religious ethic of Philo, a combination of Stoic, Platonic, Neopythagorean and Old Testament gnomic wisdom, already bears the marks which we recognise in Neoplatonism.
The rhetorical and dramatic elements are reduced; and the material is communicated in a style of gnomic pregnancy.
The proverb, or "gnomic verse," is very common in Old English poetry.
These verses are examples of gnomic poetry, which was very popular in Old English literature.
He would settle himself in an armchair in the smoking-room, his eyes close to the book, and plunge into those dark waters of the gnomic elegist.
Among his other attainments he abruptly discovered the gift of noble gnomic verse.
From his occasional poems an expert and careful hand might easily gather a noble anthology of excerpts, chiefly gnomic or meditative, allegoric or descriptive.
The gnomic verses, the mythological summaries, may be passed over for the present; whatever illustrations they afford of early beliefs and ideas, they have no evidence to give concerning the proportions of stories.
They took earlier to the line of reasonable and dignified narrative, reducing the lyrical element, perhaps increasing the gnomic or reflective proportions of their work.
But there are others in this gnomic measure which it is not easy to keep far apart from such dialogue poems as Balder's Doom, though their verse is different.
Witness Hillel, and indeed all the writers of the gnomic wisdom in the "Ethics of the Fathers.
The Exeter Book contains also several pieces of a gnomic character, conveying proverbial instruction in morality and worldly wisdom.
Occasionally the Historical Perfect is used of a general truth ('Gnomic Perfect').
Even the weighty sentences and gnomic judgments upon human affairs, uttered by his actors, are necessitated by the straits in which they find themselves.
Yet by eliminating the writers of elegies and iambics, who have been considered separately as gnomic poets and satirists, the field is somewhat narrowed.
But it is in the gnomic poets that we first discover a tendency to return and reason upon such questions: the wedge of philosophical scepticism was being inserted into the old beliefs of the Greek race.
Thus Solon bore a prominent part in all the most important affairs of the period to which the gnomic poetry belongs.
In Mimnermus, however luxurious he may have been, we yet observe a vein of meditation upon life and destiny which prepares us for the more distinctly gnomic poets.
Xenophanes, a native of Colophon, and the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, has left some elegies of a gnomic character, which illustrate another point in the Ionian intellect.
The doubt of authorship which hangs over all the gnomicfragments warns us, therefore, to be cautious in ascribing them to Solon.
Phocylides, to judge by the scanty fragments which we possess of his poems, was almost wholly gnomic in his character.
It must be remembered that Theognis was the only Doric poet of the gnomic class--all those who have been hitherto mentioned belonging without exception to the Ionian family of the Greek race.
But Bhartrihari, the still popular gnomic poet, was a Buddhist.
The doctrine of Karma is intensely ethical and ethical discussions are more prominent in the Epics than in Homer, besides being the subject of much gnomic and didactic poetry.
The other two are legendary figures to whom anthologies of populargnomic verses are ascribed and some of those attributed to Kapilar are probably ancient.
The Gnomic poets and the Seven Sages had crystallized morality in apothegms.
It may be mentioned in conclusion that, with one or two very inconsiderable exceptions, none of the poems of the early Greek lyrists and Gnomic writers are received into the so-called Anthology.
A few gnomic sentences, here and there introduced, suffice to maintain the reflective character of a meditated work of art.
The Gnomic poets show how guilt, if unavenged at the moment, brings calamity upon the offspring of the evil-doer.
Rückert has also enriched the German language with a mass of gnomic poetry, to the writing of which he was led by his Oriental studies.
This gnomicpoetry (The Wisdom of the Brahman) has been aptly said to recall at times the ripeness of the mature Goethe and at other times--Polonius.
Of the gnomic movement typified by the moral works of the poets named above, Prof.
But it has been observed that many of the ethical reflections of the great dramatists, and in particular of Sophocles and Euripides, are gnomic distiches expanded.
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.
The chiefgnomic poets were Theognis, Solon, Phocylides, Simonides of Amorgos, Demodocus, Xenophanes and Euenus.
The Gnomic Poets of Greece, who flourished in the 6th century B.
He surpassed, we are told, the ethnic gnomic wisdom of all the children of the East--the Arabians and Chaldaeans, and all the vaunted scientific and mystic wisdom of Egypt.
Its conclusions were expressed chiefly in a gnomic form, and they pass through various stages in the Sapiential Books of the Old Testament.
A certain amount of magical and gnomic poetry has also survived, while metrical riddles are numerous, but these need not concern us here.
In particular the proverbial part of the Works and Days has many analogies in gnomic poetry, both English and Scandinavian.
Reference should have been given to the Exeter Gnomic Verses, 89 ff.
But the gnomic and theological poems of the Edda show a wholly different tone, which at its worst (e.
Shelley's Triumph of Life is "a noble but vague gnomic poem, in which Petrarch's Trionfi are summed up and sometimes excelled.
Homer and Hesiod, and the Gnomic poets, constituted the educational course," to which may be added the saws and aphorisms of the Seven Wise Men, and we have before us the main sources of Greek views of duty.
The era of popular and unconscious morality is represented by the times of Homer, Hesiod, the Gnomic poets, and "the Seven Wise Men of Greece.
