The literary and philosophical texts of ancient Greece and early China have been the objects of comparative study ever since Jesuit missionaries placed the two traditions in contact in the seventeenth century. Interest in the comparison has grown substantially since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a result in part both of the economic and political resurgence of China and of an emerging disciplinary awareness in classical studies of the value of extending the field’s gaze beyond the Greek- and Latin-speaking worlds.

The volume of essays under review is a happy case in point. Nine scholars examine texts from Greece and China under a comparative perspective, through the lens of ‘wisdom literature’, and under the distinguished editorial guidance of Most and Puett. The volume emerged from a course at the Kosmos Summer University at the Humboldt University of Berlin in the summer of 2015, but bears the welcome signs of extensive dialogue among the participants thereafter: numerous footnotes attest to the benefits each author gained from their peers over the years of editing and revision. Several of the participants make clear that their expertise lies in one of the two traditions, not in both; but this ongoing dialogue has done much to ensure that each of the essays has something meaningful to say to specialists on both sides.

The editors express the conviction in the introduction ‘that no one culture can possibly be understood well unless it is compared with others’ (p. 8). Indeed, far too many discussions of the distinctiveness of Graeco-Roman (and for that matter of Chinese) texts rely on an analysis of those texts on their own terms, the claim for distinctiveness resting on the implicit assumption that what readers have not bothered to search for in other cultures must not exist there. The scholars whose work is collected in this volume have bothered to make that search and have found it on the whole fruitful. The authors repeatedly speak to the insights that they have gained into the primary texts they study through the comparative project. A review of the Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing), for example, inspires K.W. Yu to interrogate the relationship between Hellenistic paradoxographical texts and the interests of contemporary political institutions, and G. Basile’s reading of the Shiji of Sima Qian helps him to reassess Herodotus’ authorial self-presentation.

Each of the chapters pertains in some way to the category of ‘wisdom literature’, and the volume as a whole offers a useful addition to existing debates on the validity and usefulness of that category, debates traced in the introduction and returned to throughout the collection. I would suggest that the volume’s chief insight lies in the importance of distinguishing two notions of literary genre: one, the self-conscious and explicit filiation of one text to another through shared participation in a named category of texts; the other, a looser, transcultural, analytical category that enables comparative study. Each notion of genre has its value, but it becomes apparent in the reading of this volume that debates about ‘wisdom literature’ seem to conflate the two or perhaps to deprecate the latter notion for failing to meet the conditions of the former. Certainly, few of the texts discussed in the volume (even in Greek and still less in Chinese) could be characterised as ‘wisdom literature’ in the narrower sense derived from Biblical and Near Eastern studies, and these essays do nothing to support that more rigorous notion of self-conscious literary genre. Each of the texts discussed, however, participates in a broader notion of ‘wisdom literature’, as described by Basile: ‘a composite body of communal, oral lore (dealing with theodicy, the Gods/human relations along with morality and codes of conduct within a culture) which becomes partially entwined and encoded into different discourse genres’ (p. 172). This broader understanding of the concept allows for the comparison of a diverse range of texts, from the poetry of the Shijing in China to the historical writings of Herodotus and Sima Qian, and the dialogues of Plato, when each text is understood as embodying ‘wisdom’ without necessarily possessing other shared generic markers. The usefulness of this comparative method in the extreme case (nearly the limit-case) of ancient Greece and China should embolden similar comparisons on smaller scales.

The nine essays are grouped into three sections, which the editors acknowledge as overlapping and non-exclusive (p. 6). Part 1 features papers whose essence lies in the comparison of Greek and Chinese texts. T. Bartoletti studies the traces of oracular traditions in both cultures, examining both the Yijing (Book of Changes) and representations of oracular practices in Herodotus and in Aristophanes, using each to elucidate the social and epistemic practices at work in the textualisation of prophecy. The next two essays compare the surviving fragments of Heraclitus and the Laozi/Daodejing. L. Parker’s essay continues Bartoletti’s interest in orality and writing, exploring the different histories of textualisation and commentary that have conveyed these texts to the present day. J.J. Zhao’s approach begins in a more concrete comparison, in the references to children in each body of text. She finds that neither text is interested in childhood per se, but rather that each deploys imagery of childhood as a foil: the Laozi contrasts the passivity and softness of infants to the greater activity and therefore vulnerability of adults, representing the infant as a model for the sage. Heraclitus’ more complex use of the child features, for example, the famous story of the children whose riddle Homer fails to answer.

Part 2 is presented as cases where the comparative study of Greek texts illuminates an analysis of Chinese texts. T. Crone studies the Great Digest (Da Lüe) chapter of the philosophical text the Xunzi, as one of a quasi-genre of Chinese texts assembling diverse anecdotes and sayings, and comparing these with the Greek gnomological tradition, once equally extensive but today surviving only in fragments. He challenges the assumption that texts like the Great Digest reflect a body of oral anecdote from which later philosophical texts derive, and suggests a link between the emergence of centralising and monarchical regimes and these collections of anecdotes and sayings focused on an individual. A. Hui investigates the silences and gaps in the Confucian Lunyu (Analects) as a point of access for the paradox of the teacher (such as Confucius or Heraclitus, but also Jesus or the Buddha) whose teachings include a suspicion of the powers of speech. Hui finds that the tradition eventually emerges out of the conflicting, fragmentary voices textually attributed to the teacher. L. Weng reads the poem Zaichi (‘Galloping’) from the Shijing in terms of commentarial debates on the appropriateness of its presumed author, Lady Mu of Xu, and her desired return to her homeland after the murder of her cousin. She contrasts the transition of the Shijing from a ‘softer’ (more oral, less contextualised) text to a ‘harder’ one to the similar process at work with Homeric epic, arguing that an increased interest in authorship is a distinctive hallmark of the process in China.

Part 3, conversely, represents cases where comparisons to Chinese texts elucidate Greek texts. Basile looks at Herodotus as the culmination of the history of early Greek prose. By comparing Herodotus’ self-presentation with that of Sima Qian, Basile is able to emphasise the former’s relatively unsophisticated presentation of methodology as well as his greater emphasis on his own identity in grounding the authority of his text (even as that identity remains, in many ways, more occluded than the vivid picture that Sima Qian offers of himself in the Letter to Ren An attached to his history). F. Pagani compares notions of self-divinisation he finds in Plato and in the Neiye, or ‘Inner Chapters’ of the philosophical text the Guanzi, seeing both as breaking in some ways with existing traditions of wisdom literature and using the comparison to emphasise the counterintuitive portrait of Plato as a religious reformer, reinforcing arguments made elsewhere to that effect by A. Klostergaard Petersen. Finally, Yu reads the remains of the Hellenistic paradoxographical tradition in light of the Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing), which likewise offers a collection of wonders and marvels distributed across the world, but which imposes a firmer geographical framework on its wonders. Doing so allows him to recuperate the paradoxographers as meaningful continuators of Aristotelian and Homeric impulses, rejecting their general scholarly dismissal.

Each of the nine essays gathered here is a rich and rewarding read in its own right and offers readers of the texts in question much food for thought. Indeed, each essay could be the basis for a much longer and more detailed study. Just as importantly, the collection reads as a coherent whole, making a meaningful overall argument on the importance of the comparative method for understanding any culture and offering a useful revisiting of the debates on ‘wisdom literature’ from a transcultural perspective. This volume deserves to be read by anyone interested in the comparison of Greece and China – which should be, as this book argues, anyone interested in either ancient culture on its own.