In this period the first start in the direction of philosophy was made. The morality which had been implicit in Homer, and had received a partial development in Hesiod, was condensed in proverbial couplets by Solon, Theognis, Phocylides, and Simonides. These couplets formed the starting-points for discussion. Many of Plato's dialogues turn on sayings of Theognis and Simonides. Many of the sublimer flights of meditation in Sophocles are expansions of early gnomes. Even the ethics of Aristotle are indebted to their wisdom. The ferment of thought produced by the political struggles of this age tended to sharpen the intellect and to turn reflection inward. Hence we find that the men who rose to greatest eminence in state-craft as tyrants or as law-givers are also to be reckoned among the primitive philosophers of Greece. The aphorisms of the Seven Sages, two of whom were Nomothetæ, and several of whom were despots, contain the kernel of much that is peculiar in Greek thought. It is enough to mention these: #mêden agan; metron ariston; gnôthi seauton; kairon gnôthi; anankêi d' oude theoi machontai#--which are the germs of subsequent systems of ethics, metaphysics, and theories of art.[6] Solon, as a patriot, a modeller of the Athenian constitution, an elegiac poet, one of the Seven Sages, and the representative of Greece at the court of Croesus, may be chosen as the one most eminent man in a period when literature and thought and politics were, to a remarkable extent, combined in single individuals.