A gnome was defined by the Elizabethan critic Henry Peacham as "a saying pertaining to the manners and common practices of men, which declareth, with an apt brevity, what in this our life ought to be done, or not done".
Fragments of Solon, Euenus, and Mimnermus have been preserved, in a very confused state, from having been written, for purposes of comparison, on the margins of the manuscripts of Theognis, whence they have often slipped into the text of that poet.
Theognis enshrines his moral precepts in his elegies, and this was probably the custom of the rest; it is improbable that there ever existed a species of poetry made up entirely of successive gnomes.
It was, unquestionably, the source from which moral philosophy was directly developed, and theorists upon life and infinity, such as Pythagoras and Xenophanes, seem to have begun their career as gnomic poets.
The gnomic spirit has occasionally been displayed by poets of a homely philosophy, such as Francis Quarles (1592–1644) in England and Gui de Pibrac (1529–1584) in France.
The once-celebrated Quatrains of the latter, published in 1574, enjoyed an immense success throughout Europe; they were composed in deliberate imitation of the Greek gnomic writers of the 6th century BC.