A 2016 Book of the Year, BBC History Magazine

Human wisdom is of little or no value', wrote Plato in his Apology. And yet the ancient Greeks, including Plato himself, more than any other people of antiquity were fascinated by the pursuit of the wisdom they called philosophia. That search for knowledge involved an extensive use of maxims and quotations, as we can see from those expressions of Homer prefaced by the phrase 'as people say'. Homer, the Seven Sages and the Pre-Socratic philosophers are still extensively quoted in all the major western languages....