Gnomic poetry consists of meaningful sayings put into verse to aid the memory. They were known by the Greeks as gnomes, from the Greek word for "an opinion". 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". It belongs to the broad family of wisdom literature, which expresses general truths about the world. Topics range over the divine and secular, to hierarchical social relationships.