To modern readers the philosophy of the poets whom we have considered will perhaps seem trite, their inspiration tame, their style pedestrian. But their contemporaries were far from arriving at this criticism. To obtain concise and abstract maxims upon the ethics of society, politics, and education was to them a new and inestimable privilege. In the gnomic poets the morality which had been merely implicit in Homer and Hesiod received separate treatment and distinct expression. The wisdom which had been gradually collecting for centuries in the Greek mind was tersely and lucidly condensed into a few pregnant sentences. These sentences formed the data for new syntheses and higher generalizations, the topics for enlarged investigation, the "middle axioms" between the scattered facts of life and the unity of philosophical system. _We_ may regard the gnomic poets with interest, partly on account of the real, if rare, beauty of some of their fragments; partly on account of their historical and illustrative value; partly because all efforts of the human mind in its struggle for emancipation, and all stages in its development, are worthy of attentive study. To the sophists, to the orators, to Socrates and his friends, to the tragic writers, to educated men at large in Hellas, they were authorities on moral questions; and their maxims, which the progress of the centuries has rendered commonplace, appeared the sentences of weightiest wisdom, oracles almost, and precepts inspired by more than human prudence. FOOTNOTES: [49] This seems to have been recognized by the ancients, as is proved by the lines quoted from Hermesianax in _Athenæus_, xiii. 597, where the epithet #malachos#, assigned to his pentameter, is meant to be emphatic. Mimnermus gave it a luxurious and tender quality. [50] Without attempting to discuss the vexed question whether Tyrtæus was a native Spartan, or, according to the ancient tale, an Athenian naturalized in Sparta, his self-identification with the people he inspired justifies the phrase that I have used above.