The Delphic maxims were pithy sayings to guide thought and behavior of the citizens of ancient Greece, engraved upon the Temple of Apollo (in Delphi). Hellenic civilization is well-known for innovating institutional democracy and the atomic theory of matter and much of basic geometry and the scientific method and about a million other things. For those laboring under the illusion that all cultures are equal (just different) take some time to review the unbelievable cornucopia of ideas that emerged from what was essentially small cluster of mid-sized cities (these cities were linked to many of the great empires of the time and were served by colonies that spanned the Mediterranean, but still!) over the span of about three centuries.
Not only is the intellectual pedigree of the Greeks unmatched - they spent a great deal of effort in trying to establish spiritual and psychological truths for individuals (aimed mostly at free male citizens-but the lessons are universal) and societies. They were devoted to eudaimonia, or the study of living a worthwhile life. I‘ve written before on the odd fact that our culture, two millennia later, has no comparable field of inquiry. The closest we might come is self-help, and the self-help genre is purely instrumental. It might help you organize time better or get a promotion but its not going to help you find meaning or give you perspective on what’s truly important in life (quite the opposite, in most cases). Their conception of philosophy was not the logic trees and transitive pairs and endless semantic exercises of the discipline today. ‘Philosophy’ literally means ‘love of wisdom’ and they used wisdom in its true, expansive sense: the most important concepts to know to avoid suffering in life, so deep and vital that they often must be won through experience.
There were 147 Delphi Maxims, I think. Some of them seem anachronistic (although surprisingly few). Some of their meanings are fairly opaque. Some govern mere standards of social propriety (“master wedding feasts”). There’s also a fair amount of repetition in wording and in meaning.