The early rulers of Western Han and Rome were faced with very different challenges in achieving the consolidation of one-man rule over vast territories and heterogeneous peoples. In Rome, the centre’s authority over peripheral territory was largely accepted, but the rule of one man was much derided. In the early Western Han, the opposite was true: while one-man rule had long been the norm, imperial authority over territory was tenuous, with portions of the empire under the rule of kings or regional lords (zhuhou), who ruled their lands and peoples autonomously, while acknowledging the emperor as the ritual centre of the empire. While the strategies undertaken by the early rulers in their respective territories to establish themselves as sole rulers, through the use of military and political means, differed greatly, there were also a number of similarities in the processes through which they consolidated their power, particularly in the ideological realm. One such similarity was that in both the Han and Roman empires, during these periods of consolidation, rulers initiated and completed reforms to the calendrical systems issued by the court. Despite the enormous differences between the two modes of calendrical computation, and the lack of direct contact between the two civilizations in this early period, there are a number of points where the processes through which they completed their calendar reforms look rather similar. Due to differences in the historiographical tradition and political circumstances, the scholars of Rome and the Han wrote about these reforms in very different ways, emphasizing or occluding information about the impact of these new calendars. By interrogating the Han sources with Roman questions of political importance, and the Roman sources with Han concerns over cosmic alignment and historical legitimacy, this chapter seeks to demonstrate some of the similarities between the calendrical reforms that a comparative approach reveals.

Think of a monument that once stood in a city named after the goddess of love, a short drive from the Aegean Sea. Around 170 ce, the citizens of Aphrodisias set up a statue for one Marcus Ulpius Carminius Claudianus, chief priest of imperial cult for the province of Asia.1 If the statue, which did not survive the passing of time, was anything like other monuments of the age, it would have stood more than 4 meters tall (approximately 14 feet).2 At the base of the marble likeness of the man, the donors inscribed an inscription, enumerating the local projects Carminius Claudianus patronized, including the provision of seats in the local theater.

Some 2,000 years ago, two “food empires” occupied the eastern and western sides of Eurasia, and sustained themselves on the concrete foundations of the food mechanism: production, collection, and distribution.1 They established and expanded their empires by acquiring more cultivable land and people, by encouraging or enforcing people to yield more agricultural products, and by developing infrastructures and systems to produce and circulate food more effectively. Rulers in both places invested much effort in policies destined to optimize their food systems of sustainability.2

The ancient peoples of Greece and China represented themselves and others in diverse ways in their surviving literature and art. What appears to approximate a sense of collective ethnic identity and the ‘othering’ of those perceived to be different (i.e., foreigners) existed in both cultures. In the Greek context the collective ‘panhellenic’ identity of that ethnos, which was used to connect the highly fractious and heterogeneous Greek sub-ethne (Dorians, Ionians, Aeolians, etc.) across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, was sometimes expressed via what modern scholars have termed polarity, an oppositional identity vis-à-vis the ‘Barbarian’. A host of scholarship has arisen to address the question of when exactly the notion of Greek-Barbarian polarity or antithesis first appeared. Some have associated its ‘invention’ with Athenian drama (Aeschylus in particular) in the context of Athenian propaganda vis-à-vis members of the Delian League in the fifth century bce.

This chapter will compare the oratorical cultures of ancient Rome and early imperial China in the period from ca. 200 bce to 200 ce: that is, the two last centuries of the Republican age and the early empire in Roman history, and the Qin and Han dynasties in China.1 It will examine especially the practices of oratory and the function of oratory as a means of communication between rulers and people. It will first describe the institutional mechanisms and venues in which oratory before the people was developed in Rome, to then explore whether such oratory before the people existed in early imperial China at all, or whether its institutions prompted a different oratorical culture. This investigation will allow us to draw some conclusions on the role of the people in decision-making processes and on the relation between the people and rulers in Rome and China.

In China and Greece a remarkably similar idea arose. In both cultures, the idea of a conceptual dichotomy between self and Other was posited early on, after a period of intense encounters with concrete others in a context of colonization. In this chapter I intend to trace the early development of this dichotomy in China in comparison to early Greece, to examine its role in shaping the self-perceptions of the “Chinese” and the “Greeks,” and the outlooks of their respective societies.

For some decades now, the study of history seems to have tumbled into a deep identity crisis. On the one hand, the teleological model of History as equivalent to the ‘History of Progress’ is increasingly questioned: the undeniable advance of modern information technology has deepened social inequalities rather than levelling them, and the gradual decline of the Western world has challenged the very basis of our understanding of history which was, hitherto, grounded in the idea that history inevitably tended to the victory of democracy, liberty, and rationality, and that these utterly Western values were necessarily superior to the allegedly traditional values of other cultures.

A defining marker of the tyrant is the humiliation of his subjects, or those1 within his purview. These humiliations, not any political miscalculation, are often the origin of his downfall. As Machiavelli remarks in The Prince, “[O]ne of the most powerful remedies that a prince has against conspiracies is not to be hated by the people generally.”2 In romanticized accounts, the fall of the tyrant is a cause for jubilation, bringing liberty, renewed opportunities for righteous government, and for the grievances of the populace to be finally, mercifully, heard and attended to. Those who bring about the tyrant’s downfall are the heroes of this liberation narrative, risking terrible punishment to palliate widespread discontent. But is this the narrative of the ancients, with selfless heroes bringing liberation and profound change to the sociopolitical system? From Roman and Chinese imperial records, it appears not.

Imagine the following scenes. In Chang’an, capital of Western Han, a noble was in his coach-and-four, exiting the gate of his residence directly onto the avenue that would lead him to the Weiyang Palace. A gold seal was attached to his belt by means of a purple ribbon, and he wore a cap with three bridges.1 In Rome, another noble was making his way from his home on the Palatine Hill to the forum. He was clothed in a tunic with a broad purple stripe, the so-called latus clavus, wore a particular pair of shoes, and had a gold ring on his finger, all of which indicated his social status.