Today’s chicken joke makes idle fun of the earliest of the Seven Sages of Greece, Thales of Miletus (ca. -624 to ca. -546).
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Thales: Probably to advise another chicken.
The answer to the riddle is based on Diogenes Laërtius’ account of Thales’ answers to two questions:
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, “To know one’s self.” And what was easy, “To advise another.”
The anachronistic picture of Thales is from the Nuremberg Chronicle, a history of the world published in 1493 under the title Liber Chronicarum. I guess any other image, no matter how authentic it might appear to us, would be almost as anachronistic.
