Our dating of Babrius depends on P. Oxy. 1249, a papyrus fragment containing Fables 18, 110, 118 and 25, which Grenfell and Hunt dated to ‘hardly … later than the end of the second century, and [it] may easily go back to the first’. Babrius' fables are addressed to a ‘son of King Alexander’ (pr. 2.1–2). The only King Alexander we know of in the first or second century ce, is a man who was established on the throne of Rough Cilicia (or part of it) by Vespasian, probably in 72. Babrius could have been teacher to the son, who may or may not be the Branchus who is addressed in the prologue to the first book (l.2).

Of Alexander, we know only the name and two data about his career. He was, however, a small fish in a large pond, in which there were few other fish to whom he was not related by blood, marriage or patronage. He was the son of Tigranes V, whom Nero established as client king of Armenia and against whom Corbulo campaigns in Tacitus' Annals 14–15. His great-uncle, Tigranes IV, had also been king of Armenia, until he was prosecuted and executed at Rome in 36 (Ann. 6.40). Tigranes IV was a grandson of Herod the Great, and so part of a sprawling, interconnected, feuding group of families who between them controlled most of the client kingdoms of the Near East for more than two centuries.

Our last area of investigation in this section on the ‘why’ of ethics, is time. Popular sayings and stories are saturated with statements and assumptions about time. Moral judgements are made on past, future and present. The future or the past often furnishes a reason to behave in one way or another. Ethical debates, decisions and outcomes happen not just in time but because of passing time. Most striking of all, stories and sayings have a good deal to say about kairos or occasio, the idea of the ‘right time’, the ‘right moment’, a moment at which the good or bad consequences of an action can be dramatically magnified.

Proverbs, fables, gnomai and exempla present largely complementary ideas about time, though some themes emerge more strongly in some genres than others. (Kairos, for example, explicitly appears mainly in proverbs and gnomai.) We shall return to kairos later in the chapter, along with ideas about human life, decision making and change in time. We begin, however, with what may seem a contrary theme: the implied timelessness of much of our material, and what it says about the world in which ethical agents imagined themselves to live.

STILL WORLD WITH MOVING FIGURES

The word ‘world’ here is deliberately ambiguous, meaning both human society and the cosmos as a whole. Our sources talk sometimes of one and sometimes of the other, and often in a way which encompasses both.

Early versions of some of the material in this book were delivered as papers in Cambridge, Charlottesville, Helsinki, Jerusalem, Oxford, Princeton, Salamanca and Yale, and published in volumes edited by Leofranc Holford-Strevens and Amiel Vardi, José-Antonio Fernández Delgado and Antonio Stramaglia. Warmest thanks are due to the participants in all those seminars and conferences for their lively discussion of ideas and helpful suggestions.

Various chapters were kindly read in draft by David Charles, Anna Clark, Alison Cooley, Miriam Griffin, Robert Kaster, Geoffrey Lloyd, Katerina Oikonomopoulou and Malcolm Schofield. Between them they suggested numerous improvements and saved me from many mistakes. Malcolm Schofield transformed my understanding of what it meant to be a philosopher in the early Roman Empire, for which I am especially grateful.

Many Oxford colleagues have contributed to the project in informal conversations, and it is a continuing pleasure to work among so many stimulating colleagues. Among those with whom, internationally, it is a pleasure to share an interest in ethics are Catalina Balmaceda and the economist Vivien Foster, who over the years has made me think harder and more constructively about more topics than anyone else.

Wishing the book to be accessible to those without Greek and Latin, I have translated primary sources throughout. Unfortunately, to include the many thousands of texts cited in the original as well would have made the text hopelessly bulky, so with considerable regret, they are omitted.

The study of proverbs has been of only intermittent interest to classicists, which is surprising given that several useful collections and editions were made in the nineteenth century, and that across other ancient and modern cultures, proverbs are the subject of a vast and expanding body of scholarship. It would be possible, and might be highly instructive, to base an entire study on a comparison of Greek and Latin proverbs with those of surrounding societies, or with the societies, European and Arab, which inherited them. I shall make a few such comparisons in Chapter Six, but in this chapter I confine myself to some influential modern discussions of the nature and definition of the proverb, by way of establishing some working parameters for our collection in Greek and Latin.

Modern proverb scholarship began with the work of Archer Taylor in the 1930s. Taylor early recognized the special difficulty of the field, which is that while everyone knows a proverb when they hear one, and among any group of people (even scholars) there is a high level of agreement about whether a given saying should be counted as a proverb, it remains very difficult to say precisely what a proverb is. For this reason Taylor resisted detailed definitions, offering tersely in The Proverb, ‘A proverb is a saying current among the folk.’ This minimalist definition conceals a cluster approach which Taylor used in practice.

The tradition of using the sayings and doings of famous men and women of the past as examples to be imitated or avoided goes back at least to classical Greek literature. Fifth-century Athenians heard the glories of their ancestors recited in funeral speeches. By the fourth century, Attic orators referred regularly to characters of the past and invoked the past as a guide to the future. The idea of the example as a ‘gold standard’ of behaviour can be found in Plato, and other fourth-century authors explicitly encouraged the reading of their own works in this way. Xenophon, for instance, recommends the virtue of King Agesilaus of Sparta, as illustrated in Xenophon's own biography, as a guide for others, while Isocrates provides exemplary stories in his essays and commends them to his students.

The collecting of stories began in the classical period and became increasingly popular in the Hellenistic world. Metrocles the Cynic was among those credited with inventing the philosophical collection, and Cynics proved particularly good subjects, famous as they were for their outrageous statements and behaviour. A series of chreiai about Diogenes the Cynic survives in a papyrus school text of the fourth century ce: ‘Seeing a fly on this table, he said, “Even Diogenes nurtures parasites.” Seeing a woman learning her letters, he said, “What a sword is being sharpened!” … Seeing an Aethiopian munching bread, he said, “The night is consuming the day.”’

So far, we have dealt with the content of popular morality: what is approved or disapproved of in sayings and stories. In the next three chapters, we turn to the reasons why certain things are approved or disapproved of. We focus first on the language of moral comment itself, laying out its rich diversity, exploring how far terms and images run in ‘families’ (using images of the natural world, for instance, or from religion) and investigating whether certain ranges of language are consistently associated with particular actions or qualities. We shall look at the verbs in moral statements to see what basis they offer for action. Finally, we shall look briefly at a topic which is of great interest to philosophy and high culture, but which has only a limited presence in popular morality: the internal condition of the ethical agent.

Of our sources, proverbs and gnomai are by far the most useful for this exercise. The epimythia of fables offer a limited range of adjectives expressing praise or blame, and rather more verbs telling one in various ways to do or not to do something. Similarly, it is generally in the introductions to exemplary stories, if anywhere, that we find explicitly evaluative language, and its range is not wide. Proverbs and gnomai, in contrast, abound in colourful and explicit terms of praise and blame, and it is with the simplest of these that we begin.

In this chapter we draw together the main threads of the argument so far, in order to see more clearly the shape of early imperial popular morality. A number of topics have emerged as important in all four genres. Most of them can be divided broadly into two spheres: the relationship between human life and the metaphysical, including the gods and forces like fate and fortune, and the relationship between human beings in ‘public’ (i.e. not domestic) life. In these spheres, ethical agents find the greatest potential for moral conflict, debate and action. Between them, they describe what we can call with some confidence a system – a system informal, largely unintellectualized and less than wholly watertight, but nevertheless discernible and accessible to analysis.

The degree of agreement across the range of sayings and stories is striking and significant, and allows us to talk of a genuinely popular morality in the early Empire – popular in the sense that it travelled widely both up and down the social scale, and across place and time. At the same time, there are differences of opinion and emphasis within and between genres, which are significant in two ways. First, they allow us to see how morality alters incrementally up and down the social scale.

A miscellany may historically be a collection of smaller works, excerpts of works, snippets of information, stories or maxims, arranged thematically, alphabetically, chronologically, randomly or in any other way. The contents may be limited – by author, genre or subject – as much or little as the compiler chooses, though before the twentieth century, a degree of thematic unity was the norm. Anthologies, encyclopaedias, companions and even dictionaries and commentaries are therefore more or less closely related to miscellanies, if not identical to them. (There is no clear dividing line between the miscellany and the anthology, but it is convenient, and intuitively appropriate to classicists, to reserve ‘anthology’ for collections of epigrams.)

There is no soi-disant ancient genre of miscellany, the nearest being satura (originally a medley of prose and/or verse compiled to be read or performed on stage, and later the genre of satire), which only covers a fraction of works which one can call miscellaneous. Those who compiled what we should call miscellanies gave them a variety of names. Aulus Gellius called his miscellany Attic Nights, describing it as commentaria, ‘notes’. Gellius reports (praef. 6–9) no fewer than thirty titles which other compilers had given to works of a similar type, of which the least picturesque include From My Reading, Problems, Handbook, Memorabilia, Things, Incidentals, Things Educational, Topics, Questions and Things Thrown Together.

In English, the term ‘gnomic saying’ has a wide scope, including proverbs, riddles, mottoes, legal axioms and even the epimythia of fables. Gnômê in Greek and sententia in Latin are used of both proverbs and moralizing quotations, but for clarity, I am restricting them to the second group. The boundary, as we have seen, is occasionally hazy, as poets give memorable form to common sentiments or attributable quotations become proverbial. As usual, when in doubt I follow the sources' own view of whether a particular saying is popular and anonymous (i.e. proverbial) or has a known origin. The most famous example of a borderline case in this chapter is the Sayings of the Seven Sages. These, which should probably, properly, be regarded as anonymous and proverbial, overlap both with the Delphic maxims and with some proverbs, but they were so generally attributed to the Sages in antiquity that it seems perverse not to count them as gnomai.

Despite overlapping vocabulary and some borderline cases, Greek and Latin speakers could and did distinguish between quotations and anonymous proverbs, and the overlap of identical material between anthologies of proverbs and gnomic sayings is tiny (a fraction of a percentage point). The definition of a gnome was of particular interest to rhetoricians. Hermogenes of Tarsus offers this in his second-century Progymnasmata:

From philosophy, we turn finally to evidence for popular morality in two very different genres, documents on papyrus and on stone. This chapter has a certain miscellaneous quality of its own, but I hope to a purpose. It aims to sketch, through examples and case studies, how the material we have been examining compares with the moral language of a number of other widely shared discourses from the early Empire.

One of the attractions of documents is that some, at least, of them come from a lower social level than the great majority of our literary survivals. Most (virtually all papyri) are provincial, and originate outside large urban centres. Many deal with the mundane activities of relatively ordinary people: craftsmen, farmers, traders, soldiers, local magistrates. Whole social groups, notably women, freedmen and members of ethnic minorities, who in literature are overlooked or marginalized, come into their own in papyri and inscriptions, and are revealed as active, often influential members of their communities.

Unfortunately for our purposes, the social distribution of documents which are long and complex enough to deploy ethical language and ideas, does not match that of documents in general. Funerary inscriptions, for instance, which list the virtues of the deceased are nearly always among the longer and more elaborate productions, often composed in verse or illustrated with a relief, which tells us that the family concerned was relatively wealthy.

Like proverbs, fables are an unexpectedly elusive genre: while everybody knows one when they hear it, they remain difficult to define beyond dispute. The problem was already recognized in antiquity, and it does not help that neither Latin nor Greek has a single word for ‘fable’, that all the words they use have other meanings and that none can be tied to certain types of fable and not others. They include in Greek, mythos, ainos, ainigma and logos, and in Latin, apologus, apologatio, fabula, fabella and affabulatio.

In many ways, however, the study of fables is easier than that of proverbs, especially in the first and second centuries ce. In addition to fables themselves, there survive several contemporary discussions of the nature of fables. Better still, scholarly study of fables in recent years has familiarized classicists with international fable scholarship, collected and assessed the ancient material, and offered a range of definitions by which to approach it.

In the first century, the rhetorician Theon, dealing with fables as a preliminary exercise in the study of rhetoric (progymnasma), defines the fable (which he calls mythos but explains that other people call ainos or logos) as ‘a fictitious story giving an image of truth’.