Delphic Maxims: Know Thyself, Nothing in Excess and a Stone in Afghanistan

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Visitors to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi were greeted by three sayings that Pliny the Elder said were written in gold by the first century: know thyself, nothing in excess, and a warning that making a pledge brings ruin. Greeks credited them to Apollo or to the Seven Sages of the 600s BCE, but historians now believe they began as ordinary peasant proverbs. Know thyself originally reminded people that they were mortal and should not challenge the gods, until Plato turned it inward in the Phaedrus. Nothing in excess warned against excessive grief at funerals and lavish sacrifices, and Aristotle built his golden mean on it.

The third maxim was ambiguous because the Greek word for pledge could mean guaranteeing a loan, making a marriage vow or asserting a dogmatic opinion. Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus debated it, Romans read it as advice against guaranteeing debts, and Diogenes Laertius linked it to Pyrrho's skepticism. Stobaeus later listed 147 Delphic maxims, a list scholars dismissed until stones proved it. A pillar found in 1901 at Miletopolis in modern Turkey carried 56 of them, and in 1966 excavators at Ai-Khanoum in northern Afghanistan found a third century BCE inscription set up by Clearchus, who had copied the maxims at Delphi.

• The Ai-Khanoum maxims stood in a gymnasium, the educational and social center of Greek cities.
• By the 17th century, writers such as John Milton used nothing in excess mainly as a warning against gluttony.
• Pindar, Sperone Speroni and Paul Elmer More criticized moderation as a recipe for mediocrity.
• Plutarch noted that confusion over the pledge maxim discouraged people from marrying, trusting neighbors and speaking their minds.
• The Ai-Khanoum stone lists life stages: well-behaved as a child, self-controlled as a youth, just as an adult, a good counselor in old age, and free of sorrow at death.