The Seven Sages

The Greeks say that, after Orpheus and Linus and the most ancient of the poets among them, the first to be admired for wisdom were the seven called the Sages.

and after them, much younger still, are the lawgivers among the Greeks, Lycurgus and Solon, and the seven sages, and those about Pherecydes the Syrian and Pythagoras the great, who lived somewhere low down about the Olympiads, as we have shown.

So those who prophesied in the time of Darius the son of Hystaspes, in the second year of his reign — Aggaeus and Zacharias and the Messenger among the Twelve, who prophesied in the first year of the forty-eighth Olympiad — are shown to be older than Pythagoras, who is placed about the sixty-second Olympiad, and than the oldest of the sages among the Greeks, Thales, who lived about the fiftieth Olympiad.

On that brahman and tapas the Seven Sages subsist—he who knows this.

and those famous seven were named wise not by their own, but by the vote of all peoples.

And so both those Seven, who were held and named by the Greeks sophoi, by our countrymen sapientes (wise men), and, many ages before, Lycurgus, in whose times Homer too is reported to have lived, before this city was founded, and already in the heroic ages Ulysses and Nestor — we have heard that these both were and were held wise men.

Yet in spite of these great claims to distinction he set his heart upon nothing as much as becoming one of the Seven Sages, believing that philosophy was no reproach but that it brought honor to those who pursued it, having been no less wise in this very judgement than in the others in which he showed himself superior.

The maxims of the Seven Sages, too, they hear were set up of old at Delphi, as, in a manner, certain first-fruits of those men's wisdom and at the same time for the benefit of mankind—as being in truth divine, and well-nigh more divine than the oracles which the Pythia delivered, sitting upon the tripod, filled with the breath of the god.

The seven sages, having come together for the sake of a lotus, swore an oath to Indra, without agitation, for their mutual purification.

over seven centuries they have ascended to heaven, still embodied.

"For those who bow to these enlightened sages, O Rāma, no misfortune whatsoever is seen to afflict their bodies.

Having paid their salutations, the righteous-souled Rāma, his brother Lakṣmaṇa, Sugrīva, and the monkeys proceeded with joyful hearts.