In the following imaginary ‘Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages’ the supposed narrator is a certain Diocles of Corinth, a professional diviner and expiator of omens connected with the court of Periander, who was despot of Corinth from 625 B. C. to 585 B. C. The dramatic date is towards the close of that period. It must not be assumed that Plutarch is pretending to be historical, and anachronisms must be disregarded.

The Seven Sages are here Thales, Bias, Pittacus, Solon, Chilon, Cleobulus, Anacharsis (see Notes on Persons and Places). The list varies with different writers, but Thales, Bias, Pittacus, and Solon are invariably, and Chilon is regularly, included in the canon. Periander is himself sometimes made one of the number, and a certain Myson also appears.

The qualities which constituted a ‘sage’ in this connexion were those of keen practical sense and insight, and a power of crystallizing the results into pithy maxims. He was not a ‘philosopher’ in the later sense of that word.