A great deal of ancient wisdom literature is framed as instruction to a young man of rank, often a son or a prince. The convention shaped both the content and its survival.
The frame identifies the audience
Literacy and access to manuscripts were narrow. A text addressed to someone who would govern was written for the people who could actually read and preserve it.
The advice reflects that position, concerning speech before superiors, the management of dependants, the handling of wealth and the danger of flattery.
Reading such texts as general life advice therefore misses part of their sense. They were composed for a specific station with specific hazards.
Instruction is easier to remember as address
Second-person instruction from an older figure to a younger one gives the material a voice and a situation, which makes it far easier to hold in memory.
A list of maxims is inert; the same maxims spoken by a father to a departing son acquire an order and an occasion.
The framing also supplies authority without argument. The text does not need to prove its claims because the relationship it depicts already carries weight.
The frame limits what can be said
Advice to a future ruler is necessarily prudential. It concerns how to act well within a settled order rather than whether that order should exist.
Radical questions about legitimacy or property rarely appear, and where they do, they are usually voiced by a figure the text places at a distance.
The constraint is worth noticing because it explains an apparent conservatism that has more to do with genre than with the beliefs of whoever composed the work.
Court patronage preserved these texts
Copying was expensive and required a patron. Works useful to the households that funded copying were reproduced, and works without such use were not.
Survival therefore selected for material a court would want its heirs to read, which is a filter applied over centuries rather than a single editorial decision.
What reached us is consequently a sample rather than the whole. Traditions of advice circulating among farmers or traders left far less durable evidence.
Why the form still reads well
The situations described, dealing with a difficult superior, keeping a confidence, judging when to speak, recur in ordinary working life at every level.
Readers substitute their own circumstances without effort, which is why collections composed for palace officials remain in print for general audiences.
That portability is not accidental. Advice narrow enough to be concrete tends to travel better than advice general enough to be safe.