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The Art of Living

The Delphic Injunctions

Massimo Pigliucci philosophises about prophetic principles.

For hundreds of years during Antiquity people went on pilgrimages to the Oracle at Delphi in Greece, hoping for prophecies that would help them in their lives. This included everyone from kings to regular folks. Even today you can sense the attraction: I went to Delphi three times, and it really is a magical place even if one doesn’t believe in magic.

One of my favorite stories about Delphi is a wonderful example of political genius dressed up as religious interpretation. In 480 BCE, with Xerxes’ massive Persian army already marching through Greece, the Athenians sent envoys to Delphi in near panic. The Oracle’s response was rather cryptic: she said that “the wooden wall alone shall not fall” and would protect Athens.

The debate about how to interpret this was fierce. The conservative, literal-minded reading favored by priests and older citizens, was that the ‘wooden wall’ meant the ancient thorn hedge around the Acropolis. They proposed making a last stand there.

General Themistocles argued for a radically different reading. He said the wooden wall meant the Athenian fleet, as ships are made of wood. Themistocles had actually been laying the groundwork for defences against the Persian invasion for years. He had already persuaded the Athenians to use a windfall from their silver mines to build two hundred triremes (ships with three banks of oars). He now had the fleet; he just needed the political will to use it. The Oracle gave him his opening.

He won the argument. The Athenians evacuated the city – which the Persians duly burned – but at Salamis the overwhelmingly Athenian Greek fleet destroyed the Persian navy, effectively ending Xerxes’ campaign.

Clearly, Themistocles didn’t passively receive the Oracle’s wisdom, he constructed an interpretation that matched the strategic vision he already held. Most people who went to Delphi, though, didn’t even get a prophecy: they were instead greeted with moral imperatives carved in stone – the famous Delphic injunctions. These were not divine revelations about the future, they were present life demands placed on the visitor, in other words, ethical principles.

There’s a whopping hundred and fifty inscriptions associated with the Delphic Oracle, collected by Stobaeus in the fifth century CE. Three of these have reached the status of canonical, though it’s a good bet that most people only know the first. The major three are: Gnothi seauton (‘Know thyself’); Meden agan (‘Nothing in excess’); and the lesser-known Eggua, para d’ata (‘Make a pledge and ruin is near’ – meaning, ‘Avoid rash commitments’). Let’s take a closer look at these ideas.

‘Know thyself’ is the richest, and the most misread. Our popular contemporary (mis)understanding is introspective: Know your feelings, your desires, your psychology. But the (true) ancient reading is more deflationary, and more interesting: Know what kind of thing you are – you are not a god, you are mortal, limited, fallible. It’s a warning against hubris as much as an invitation to self-reflection. Socrates famously took it in yet another direction – concerning knowing the extent of what you don’t know. For this the Oracle declared him the wisest man in Athens.

‘Nothing in excess’ has an obvious Aristotelian resonance, and is really a meta-ethical principle about virtue. It’s not merely ‘Don’t drink or eat too much’, then: it’s a structural claim that virtue lives in calibration, and that every good thing has a shadow version when pursued without measure. For instance, courage is good, but recklessness is foolish.

The third injunction, ‘Make no rash pledges’, is particularly intriguing. It cautions us against the kind of overconfident pledge-making that assumes we control things we don’t. There’s a striking connection with the Stoic’s ‘reserve clause’ – the idea that we should accompany every statement of commitment we make with a qualification like ‘fate permitting’, to indicate that we’re only in charge of our intentions, not of the ultimate outcomes.

There’s a unifying thread here: all three injunctions are, at bottom, about knowing your limits, epistemically, morally, and practically. They aren’t self-help advice, then; they’re a philosophical anthropology compressed into three commands. What makes them still interesting today is that they push back against the modern tendency toward self-aggrandisement. It’s ‘know yourself’, instead of ‘maximize yourself’; ‘nothing in excess’, not ‘optimize everything’; and ‘be careful in making pledges’, rather than ‘say yes to everything’ and then struggle to keep all your commitments. What all three maxims share, and what makes them collectively so alien to present culture, is that they are philosophies of acknowledged finitude, whereas ours is a culture that treats finitude as a problem to be engineered away. Modern technological and therapeutic culture is essentially a sustained argument that human limits are contingent, not necessary – that with the right tools, mindset, or intervention, we can overcome our mental limits and cognitive biases, extend our lifespans, optimize our performance, and control the outcomes to all our plans. The Delphic injunctions instead say, “No. Limits are part of what we are. Working with them, rather than against them, is what wisdom actually looks like.”

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic: The Power of Doubt in a Meaningful Life (Penguin). More by him at figsinwintertime.substack.com.