Rulers and Ruled in Ancient Greece, Rome, and China represents the first fruits of the Global Antiquities Research Network established at McGill University. “Global antiquities” is specified as the ancient worlds of Greece, Rome, and China (what about the rest of Eurasia, not to speak of ancient America and Africa?). This places the project alongside already well-established research programs comparing Greco-Roman and Chinese antiquities, notably Sino-Hellenic studies, particularly that associated with Geoffrey Lloyd and associates and the Stanford-based Ancient Chinese and early Mediterranean Empires Comparative History Project. The editors of this volume, Hans Beck and Griet Vankeerberghen, differentiate their network's orientation from these competitors through a focus on meso-level political institutions and culture, rather than the more purely cultural focus of Sino-Hellenic studies (comparative philosophy, comparative literature, history of science, etc.) and the macro-historical comparisons of the Stanford project, “steered by statistical approaches or the exploration of imperial bureaucracies” (p. xiii).

The distinctive orientation and the levels of analysis characteristic of the project are spelled out in an introductory chapter by the editors, “addressing some of the key issues that related to the notion of ‘the people’ in the variant of each civilization” (p. 1): Greek demos, Roman populus, and Chinese min. A lucid and insightful discussion sketches the history of these terms, and the changing social and political realities that they reflected, from archaic Greece to the Hellenistic world, early Republican Rome, to the empire and late Bronze Age China, to the Han. The authors stress the strong military and civic orientation of concepts of “the people” in the Greek and Roman cases and the role of “the people,” variously configured and defined above all through citizen assemblies, in collective decision-making. Although comparable active political involvement can be detected for the guoren, the city inhabitants of the Western Zhou, this seems to have been erased, along with the autonomy of city-states, during the Warring States period, and the scope for agency on the part of commoners became extremely restricted. The discussion is fascinating, but could have benefited from being longer, not least since these central issues are only somewhat fleetingly picked up in the subsequent essays, all of which are briefly outlined in the remainder of the introduction. The essays that follow all address significant topics for comparative analysis, but their quality is rather variable.

Among the best is Miranda Brown's and Zhongwei Zhang's essay “A Memory of Two Stones: Social Memory in Roman Greece and Han China.” Brown and Zhang start from what, at first sight, looks like a remarkable parallelism between two texts commemorating local notables in second-century CE Aphrodisias in Asia Minor and Liyang in Shaanxi Province. Both are lengthy texts inscribed on massive stone monuments celebrating the honorand's good deeds and naming the donors of the monuments. But by reading the texts, their contexts of display, and the processes of the commissioning of the monuments of the two traditions against each other, the authors bring out some fundamental differences in the place of these practices in elite social memory in the two traditions: focused on individual cities and local traditions of civic euergetism in the Roman case, and on families and their far-flung networks of affiliation with other members of the officeholding elite in China.

Carlos Norena's essay, “Private Associations and Urban Experience in the Han and Roman Empires,” is strongly informed by the same literature in comparative historical sociology that inspired the Stanford project, entailing a strong and clear line of questioning and an explanatory agenda, rather than the simple listing of similarities and differences characteristic of some comparative work (and manifested in some of the weaker contributions in this volume). Norena seeks to characterize the distinctive lived experience of the urban middle stratum in Han and Roman cities by looking at the character of their associational life, in particular the role played by occupational associations of craftsmen and merchants, such as carpenters, textile workers, and grain traders. He argues that the highly mediated strategy of Roman imperial rule through autonomous city elites exercised an “upward push” on the formation of civic associations, emulating political structures and civic euergetism in their organizational life, while the more direct relationship between Chinese central government and subjects, achieved through an extensive bureaucracy which side-lined local elites, created a “downward push,” militating against the formation of the kinds of occupational associations found in the Roman Empire.

Hans Beck targets states’ compilation of population censuses as a strategic research site for understanding their political culture. Specifically, he explores who exactly was counted in such censuses in Rome, China, and, very briefly, in classical Athens. In the Roman case, the census focused very much on citizens and their capacity to bear arms and protect the city and, with it, to enjoy voting rights in the assembly. The Chinese census was much more extensive in its focus, seeking detailed enumeration of the entire population of the empire and their resources, facilitating the detailed bureaucratic control of taxes and labor services. The distinctive symbolic meaning of the censuses was articulated in the ritual framing of the completion of the census process. At Rome, following a ritual purification of the assembled citizen body, the census lists were placed in the Atrium Libertatis, to be guarded by the goddess Libertas, guarantor of the citizens’ freedom. In China, the registers were presented to the emperor by the responsible officials before the entire court in the context of New Year's Day festivities, including “the reception of tribute bearing emissaries from the frontier regions” (p. 203).

Rebecca Robinson explores the role played by calendar reform in the consolidation of monarchic rule in the Qin-Han Empire and under Julius Caesar and his successor Augustus as the establishers of one-man rule in Rome. With the existing calendars having become out of sync with observed seasons, both sets of monarchs faced similar problems. In each case, rewriting the calendar and promulgating a new imperial time was fundamental to establishing political legitimacy, but the monarchs adopted different strategies in light of the distinctive character of the failing responsible groups they had to work around—the Pontifical College at Rome and the Directorate of Astrology in China—and the ways in which they wished their mastery of cosmic time to inform understandings of the character of their rulership throughout their empires.

Hyun Jin Kim compares the strong polar opposition between Greek and barbarian as it developed in classical Greece with the more diffuse articulation of the relation between civilizational and ethnic identity in early China. He persuasively argues that these differences in the development of concepts of ethnic others should be attributed to the differing geopolitical situations out of which they arose: the Greeks from a position of weakness, facing up to Persian Empire as the expansive superpower of Western Eurasia, while in Eastern Eurasia, China was the expanding hegemon. This also informed the distinctively political inflection of the Greek concept of barbarian (slavish versus free Greeks) by comparison with China, where at least four designations—Yi, Rong, Di, and Man—seem to have been used to characterize ethnic others as culturally uncouth by comparison with their Huaxia counterparts.

Francisco Pina Polo examines the place played by oratory and persuasion in practices of government in ancient Rome and early imperial China. He starts from the long-established contrast between Roman Republican politicians oriented to persuading “the people,” in assemblies of one form or another, and Chinese political advisors concerned with persuading just one man, the emperor. But he develops this old stereotype in an interesting direction by asking why, with the development of monarchy at Rome, there was not more of a convergence between the two traditions. He draws attention to the distinctive ways in which the role of emperor—and his relationship with those ruled, as citizens or subjects—was defined in the two traditions, with the Roman emperor as universal orator staging direct relations with the people in public, while his Chinese counterpart's sacral status was partly guaranteed by his invisibility.

Riet Vankeerberghen develops a comparison of the social and cultural strategies of the nobility in late Republican Rome and Western Han China, arguing that the parallels—for example, in genealogical interests and ways of celebrating familial success—should be understood in terms of the intense competition to reproduce family status through office holding, while differences (e.g., in burial practices) can be understood in terms of the different contexts of political organization (republic, monarchy). Notwithstanding some interesting initial ideas, the analysis lacks much depth, partly because engagement with relevant primary sources is so limited, especially on the Roman side.

Garret Olberding explores the character of narratives of political assassination of “tyrants” in Chinese and Roman historical writing, focusing on Jing Ke's attempted assassination of the King of Qin, later the First Emperor, for the former and Suetonius accounts of the deaths of notorious bad emperors—Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero—in the Roman case. He argues that the comic tone of such narratives in both traditions can be explained by the role of humor in providing “temporary release from that which oppresses” (p. 309).

David Engels draws a series of fascinating analogies between the processes of development of autocracy and empire in Warring States—Han China and late Republican/early imperial Rome, with a particular focus on the ways in which Han Gaozu and Augustus responded to and learned from the mistakes of their predecessors, Qin Shi Huangdi and Julius Caesar. Sadly, the analysis is vitiated by being placed in the frame of Spengler-style cultural history, posing the simplistic question “to what degree historical individuals . . . have to be considered as really free or independent beings, or rather as simple exponents of an inevitable structural dynamic” (pp. 347–48), rather than exploring the concepts of structured agency, path dependency, and the like, with which such issues are addressed in more sophisticated work.

The four remaining essays, while addressing significant topics, have rather limited value, since they do not seriously engage with the comparative agenda of the volume. Yang Huang's chapter, “The Invention of the Barbarian and Ethnic Identity in Early Greece and China,” “discusses the Chinese evidence in detail” in the hope that it “might throw some light on the question of the barbarian in Greece in the early period” (p. 400)—specifically, whether the concept emerged early (eighth-century colonization) or late (fifth-century Persian Wars). This is a logical fallacy: just because ethnic identity develops in one way in China, that does not entail anything for whether it developed in a similar or a different way in Greece, for which the relevant evidence is barely discussed. There is too much reference to “the Chinese” placed in inverted commas, without sufficient discussion of the various terms used in the original texts, and the analysis of the use of terms such as Yi, Rong, Di, and Man does not make it clear to what extent these identities were cultural, political, or ethnic, and what kinds of difference they entailed from the terms glossed as “Chinese.”

Robin Yates's essay on “Female Commoners and the Law in Early Imperial China” is framed with some tantalizingly brief general comments on the difficulties of comparing Chinese and Roman law, but it focuses almost exclusively on details of the Chinese material. For example, six pages on “illicit intercourse” in early Chinese law, with detailed discussions of the relevant primary materials (including two further pages of notes), is set against half a page on stuprum as the equivalent in Roman law (referencing one secondary source). Moonsil Lee Kim's essay on food distribution dedicates roughly ten pages of detailed analysis of Chinese primary materials for each one on the Roman case, for which only a handful of secondary sources are cited. Alexander Jakobson's contribution is ostensibly about refusals of office on the part of potential rulers, in the Chinese and Roman traditions, but with just two pages on China against twenty-two on Rome. Meaningful comparison is impossible when the level of resolution at which the issues and source materials are addressed is so different for the two traditions.

The inclusion of these four papers seems like an editorial failing: either the papers should have been omitted, or the authors should have been asked to substantially revise their papers to meet the basic levels for comparative study established by work in the field of Sino-Hellenic studies, or exemplified in the comparisons of the Roman and Chinese empires offered by the Stanford project. This seems a shame, since they significantly detract from a volume which otherwise contains some significant contributions to a new direction in the comparison of the Greco-Roman and early Chinese worlds. In particular, the essays of Brown and Zhang, Norena, Beck, Robinson, and H. J. Kim are high-quality, pathbreaking contributions that should be of interest to specialists of both Greco-Roman and Chinese antiquities, as well as being excellent exemplars on which to base further comparative studies.