Chilon, Legislator & Philosopher of Sparta ca. 1615 Jan Muller Netherlandish The philosopher Chilon seems ready to burst out of the frame in this in this startling portrait by Jan Muller. He holds a convex mirror in his massive hands, crowding the picture plane, and turns his head slightly away as he looks out at the viewer. Chilon was a philosopher and councilor in the city-state of Sparta and one of the Seven Sages of Greece - seven philosophers, statesmen and lawgivers who were known for their wisdom in the early sixth century BCE. Muller has made him into a grotesque figure, using a dramatically swelling and tapering line, to emphasize the warts on his face and his wildly curling hair. His mirror embodies his motto, "know thyself," a phrase repeated in Greek and Latin in the inscriptions on the oval frame.Three years earlier, in 1593, Muller had engraved a portrait of the Harpocrates, the god of silence (accession no. 51.501.6334), also slightly larger than life and in an oval fram