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12 INTRODUCTION

Asia of the young Greek woman Io, disagreeing as to whether she was kidnapped or ran away voluntarily. Herodotus explicitly refuses to say which version is true. Instead, he reports the evidence from the conflicting sources and leaves it to his audience to draw their own conclusions.

At the same time, however, Herodotus presents his own subjective interpretations of the forces driving history. This recognition that his- torians necessarily combine objectivity and subjectivity in doing their work . is another characteristic of Herodotus that seems to anticipate modern approaches to and controversies about how to write history. Forces in history that Herodotus emphasizes are the human desire for freedom, the flawed nature of human understanding of the world, and the possibility that events are determined at some deep level by the cosmic justice of tisis (divine retribution or vengeance) . Tisis, he sug- gests, tends over the long term to compensate for excesses in human behavior, thereby achieving a rough justice in the workings of the world. Sometimes this cosmic justice amounts to punishment, especially when humans behave in ways that bring nemesis (divine retaliation) upon themselves or their descendants, as in the stories of Gyges and Croesus (Document 1) or Hermotimus and Panionius (Document 5). Other times, Herodotus says, tisis strikes even when a person has good intentions, as in the case of Croesus.

Tisis is part of Herodotus's complex presentation of the interaction of the supernatural and the human. He does not describe gods as intervening directly in individual human lives-that is, gods never tell an individual how to act, as they do in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. But Herodotus does describe a divine effect on history on a larger scale by claiming that the gods supported the Greeks in their fight against the Persians. In one of his few direct comments on this narrative, Herodotus says that in defeating the Persian king and his army, it was the gods who held first place, followed closely by the Athenians in second.8 Through his choice of stories, Herodotus sought to motivate his audience to think about how and why human power and fortune rise and fall.

"Ibid. , bk. 7, sec. 139.

INTRO DUCTION 13

TilE UFE OF SIMA QIAN (CA. 145-CA. 86 BCE)

Most of what we know about the life of Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Ch'ien) 9

comes directly from his own writings (Document 7). He was born about 145 BCE near Longmen, China. By this time, the history of China stretched back nearly two thousand years, but it had been a uni- fied empire only since 221 BCE, when the First Emperor of Qin (259-210 BCE) completed the conquest of China's formerly indepen- dent regions and established the Qin dynasty (see Map 2). The emperor made himself the first ruler of a government controlling all of China. The Qin dynasty lasted for less than twenty years, but the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) that replaced it kept China together politically for centuries.10

Since the frequent wars among pre-imperial China's different regions had often led to a defeated ruler being thrown from power, the emperors worried that opposition to their rule, however slight, might produce a rebellion. Emperors therefore reacted harshly to any hint of treachery or disloyalty. They especially feared that historians would write about past tyrannical rulers as a way to stimulate resistance to the present ruling family. In 213 BCE, the First Emperor of Qin ordered most books with any historical content burned in public and executed more than 460 scholars because he thought they were using stories about rulers from the past to criticize him and his policies (Document 8).

When Sima Qian was about five years old, his father, Sima Tan, became Grand Astrologer at the court of the Han dynasty emperor Wu (r. 141-87 BCE). His father's duties centered on keeping track of the movements of the planets and stars and linking these celestial events to things that happened on earth. The purpose of the records was to provide the emperor with clues to the meaning of anything that occurred in his land and to provide him with a calendar indicating

"Chinese is "romanized" -transliterated into Western alphabets-according to dif- ferent systems, most notably Pinyin (used in this book) and Wade-Gilles, which can result in different spellings in English. The Library of Congress Pinyin Conversion Project discusses Chinese romanization and provides a conversion chart of the systems: www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/romcover.html. Sima (or Ssu-ma) is the historian's last (or family) name, which is given first, in accordance with Chinese usage.

'"1be rule of the Han dynasty is subdivided into two periods, the Former (or West- ern) Han (206 BCE-9 CE) and the Later (or Eastern) Han (25-220 CE) , with the Xin dynasty ruling briefly in between.

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Map 2. The Conquests of the Qin Dynasty, 221 BCE The king of Qin, a region in China, made himself the First Emperor of Qin by defeating the other regional states in China and unifying the country under imperial rule. Although his dynasty lasted only fifteen years, the emperor's uni- fication of China changed the course of Chinese history, and the imperial dynasties that followed continued until the revolutions of the twentieth century.

14

r f INTRODUCTION 15

lucky and unlucky days for performing political and religious cere- monies. The Grand Astrologer's job required studying the past, from astronomical patterns to works of philosophy and literature (which were the earliest sources for Chinese history), but the Grand Astrol- oger did not have the official duty of writing a narrative history. (It therefore seems misleading to translate the job title as "Grand Histo- rian," as is sometimes done.) 11

Sima Qian received the extensive schooling appropriate for the son of an educated father working at court: He could recite ancient texts from memory by the time he was ten years old. When he was twenty, he traveled throughout China to visit famous sites and historical landmarks. Not long afterward, he obtained a job at the imperial court. Over the next decade, he evidently performed well because in 111 BCE, Emperor Wu sent him on an expedition to reorganize part of the emperor's territory. Sima Tan died in 110 BCE, and in 108 BCE the emperor promoted Sima Qian to the position of Grand Astrologer. Sima Qian worked as an imperial official for the rest of his life, but at great personal cost.

The turning point in Sima Qian's life, though he could not have grasped it at the time, came when his father lay dying. On his deathbed, Sima Tan asked his son to finish the work of history that he had begun. Writing this work had not been part of Sima Tan's official duties for the emperor. Rather, he began writing this history on his own because he strongly believed it was valuable as a guide to proper conduct in the present. He thought that private individuals and rulers alike could learn from history by imitating past examples of virtue and dignity and avoid- ing examples of cruelty and greed. This notion about the purpose of his- tory was widely accepted in Chinese civilization because of the writings of Confucius, a philosopher of the sixth century BCE (and therefore, incidentally, a century before Herodotus) and the most famous and con- troversial figure in Chinese history. Confucius is best known in the Western world for his work Analects (Excerpts), a collection of his say- ings and conversations, as well as events from his life.

Sima Qian reports that as a young man he studied Confucius and later used the Analects and other works attributed to Confucius as important historical sources and, above all, as a guide to the purpose

11 It is difficult to translate official Chinese positions precisely into Western lan- guages. The Chinese term translated here as "Grand Astrologer" can also be translated as "Eminent Grand Astrologer," "Prefect Grand Astrologer," "Duke Grand Astrologer," or "Gentleman Grand Astrologer."

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16 INTRODUCTION

of his work. Confucius respected the past because he believed that people could best learn how to behave properly in China's hierarchical society by studying the great deeds of their ancestors and by immers- ing themselves in the customs handed down over the generations. Confucius insisted that history mattered above all because worthwhile new developments could only emerge from the cultural traditions of the past. For Confucius, the historian's job was simply to transmit knowledge of the past accurately without changing or interpreting it. This would guarantee the objectivity of the historian's account.

SIMA QIAN'S HISTORICAL WORK: THE RECORDS OF THE HISTORIAN

Sima Tan had intended to write a history of the world, which meant the history of China and the non-Chinese peoples on its borders, whom the Chinese looked down on as barbarians and culturally inferior. No one had ever written such a work before. Moreover, when Sima Qian promised to obey his father's wishes and complete this ambitious project, he was accepting a solemn duty, because obedience and loy- alty to parents were central values of Chinese civilization. It is not cer- tain how much Sima Tan had written before his death, but it seems clear that Sima Qian wrote most of this groundbreaking work, The Records of the HistorianY Like his father, Sima Qian worked on his history as a private project, not as part of his job. Still, his position as a high-ranking imperial official gave him access to court documents that allowed him to study valuable historical sources.

Sima Qian apparently thrived in the emperor's service until 99 BCE. At that point, he experienced the truth of the Chinese saying that "to serve the emperor" was "to wait for punishment." One of Sima Qian's acquaintances at court, Li Ling, had served Emperor Wu well as a successful general for years. In 99 BCE, however, General Li found himself in desperate trouble with the emperor because, in a failed attempt to escape disgrace at court after losing a battle, Li Ling had surrendered to the army of the barbarian people whom the Chi- nese called the Xiongnu (Document 7) . Since Emperor Wu's greatest security problem was to protect China from attacks by the fierce and predatory Xiongnu (Document 14), he tolerated no failures regarding

12The Chinese title is Shiji, which has also been translated as The Records of the Grand Historian and The Records of the Scribes.

r INTRODUCTION 17 this dangerous enemy. He accused General Li of betraying him and condemned Li to death. Sima Qian spoke up to defend this general whom he respected, reminding the emperor of Li's loyal service and his value if he could be saved to fight again for the emperor. Sima Qian's words evidently enraged the emperor, who threw him in prison on a charge of "speaking evil of his emperor." It was expected that Sima Qian would either pay a large fine to be released or commit sui- cide. Since he lacked the money to buy his way out of punishment and no one volunteered to give him the money, he faced death as his penalty.

As Sima Qian later explained in a letter to a friend (Document 7), he could not kill himself, even though that would have been the only way to preserve his honor publicly. His deep feeling of commitment to his father compelled him to try to survive despite the shamefully high price he knew he would have to pay. To obtain the emperor's permis- sion to live meant that Sima Qian would have to accept an alternative penalty-castration and the shame-filled existence he would lead as a man disgraced by his mutilation and inability to father any more chil- dren (he already had a daughter). In 98 BCE, Emperor Wu had Sima Qian castrated in the palace room called the "silkworm chamber," so named because it was kept dark and warm like the rooms housing the silkworms that helped make the emperor rich.

It is impossible to exaggerate the shame and disgrace that Sima Qian endured as a result of his decision to take this punishment so that he could continue to write his history. To have died on the orders of an unjust emperor would have been honorable; to live as a humili- ated eunuch was hell on earth. In his words, he survived as "some- thing left over from the knife and saw" (Document 7). Two years later, Emperor Wu, apparently satisfied with Sima Qian's permanent degra- dation, reinstated him to an imperial position, as palace secretary. For the remaining twelve years or so of his life, Sima Qian worked for the emperor who had mutilated him, accepting this degrading life so that he could finish his secret project to transmit a record of the past.

CHINESE HISTORY WRITING BEFORE SIMA QIAN

China's rulers had been employing officials in positions like that of Sima Tan for a thousand years or more. Though not employed specifically as historians, these officials nevertheless had a kind of indirect historical duty because they were required to record various kinds of information,

18 INTRODUGriON

especially the performance of religious sacrifices and the results of div- inations (ceremonies seeking to identify the will of divine powers and sacred ancestors). Since China had consisted of separate regional states before the First Emperor's conquests in the late third century BCE, there was a great deal of raw material for history in the official records of the regions' diplomatic missions, wars, assassinations of rulers in struggles for power, political and religious actions taken by the rulers, and natural events such as floods, earthquakes, comets, and eclipses that might sig- nify divine approval or disapproval of the rulers' actions. These records were in the form of chronologically arranged lists of short entries, not long narratives, and were linked to the official state calendar.

This kind of work eventually came to be called the Spring and Autumn Annals. 13 Chinese tradition attributed the original and most famous of these annals to the philosopher Confucius and regarded his edition as a model of how history should be used for moral guidance in politics and government. The annals believed to have been put together by Confucius record events under twelve rulers of the state of Lu during the period 722-481 BCE. Confucius's Spring and Autumn Annals are brief and consist mostly of a straightforward list of official meetings, sacrifices, battles, and deaths. They lack any overt judg- ment or interpretation on Confucius's part. Still, later Chinese historians believed that Confucius intended his work to express indirect praise and criticism of rulers through his choice of which events to include and which to omit, the order in which they were recorded, and the words used to describe them. As Dong Zhongshu (ca. 179-104 BCE), one of Sima Qian's teachers, explained,

Confucius composed the Spring and Autumn Annals to record events of the past to explain events of the future. Therefore, when something happens in the world, you should consult the Spring and Autumn Annals to discover which events it records that are similar, and then puzzle out the underlying significance of its subtleties and mysteries so that you will understand the meaning of the event you are studying .... If you do this, alterations in the celestial realm and on earth and events that affect the rulers will become perfectly clear, with nothing left uncertain. 14

13 "Spring and autumn" is an abbreviation for the four seasons of the year, indicating that the work would be arranged annually (hence the term "annals''). The commonly used title Spring and Autumn Annals refers, strictly speaking, to the original text when accompanied by later commentaries, as became usual.

14 Ban Gu, Han shu, chap. 27. Cf. Michael Loewe, Chinese Ideas of Life and Death: Faith, Myth, and Reason in the Han Period (202 BC-AD 220) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), 86.

INTRODUcrJON 19

Dong Zhongshu was so focused on learning from history about what to expect in his own time that according to Sima Qian, he spent three years in his room studying Confucius's Spring and Autumn Annals with such intensity that he never even once glanced out at his garden.

The moral judgments in Confucius's Spring and Autumn Annals were therefore so subtle and indirect that sometimes the lessons seemed hard to identify. Still, Chinese scholars such as Sima Qian were convinced that Confucius had filled this concisely written historical record with effective moral messages. As the philosopher Mencius (372-ca. 289 BCE) put it, "Confucius completed the Spring and Autumn Annals, and disloyal officials and wicked sons became afraid."15 Soon after the appearance of Confucius's Spring and Autumn Annals, com- mentators on it composed elaborate works to puzzle out the moral lessons embedded in it. They believed that if the true nature of Confucius's chronicle was understood, it would reveal the principles and conduct that a morally correct ruler must follow and the errors and crimes that he must avoid to create and govern a just state.

Other early texts accorded great respect by later Chinese historians were found in the Classic of Documents. 16 They reveal how highly Chi- nese civilization regarded history as a source of moral instruction. Confucius was believed to have edited the Classic of Documents, but, unlike the Spring and Autumn Annals, it records words instead of deeds- that is, speeches and advice reportedly given by rulers from the eleventh to the seventh century BCE. The documents all have a moral purpose, offering guidance on proper attitudes and behavior to those conducting political affairs.

THE FORM AND CONTENT OF SIMA QIAN'S IDSTORICAL WORK

Sima Qian did extensive research for his history. As he explains, he carefully studied ancient annals, searched for historical and moral in- formation in earlier works of poetry and philosophy (especially those written by and about Confucius), interviewed many people, and col- lected information from the places and landmarks he saw on his trav- els. He also took advantage of his access to official records kept at the

15 Mencius 3B9. 16 As with many works in Chinese, translations of the title of this book are not consis-

tent. It is also known, for example, as the Classic of Historical Documents or Book of Documents.

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20 INTRODUcriON

imperial court for his research. He quoted, often in full, so many docu- ments, poems, philosophical excerpts, songs, letters, inscriptions, and other texts that his work amounts almost to an anthology of earlier Chinese thought and literature. This method respected the Confucian notion that history meant simply passing down the records of the past, not creating something new. In fact, Sima Qian claimed that he was only transmitting the past, and some scholars have taken him at his word, regarding him as little more than a scribe writing down and stitching together what he found in the earlier works of others. In this view, he was objective to the point of passivity. Others, however, see him as expressing subjective interpretations of history through his bold innovation in the structure of presenting his material and his subtle comments on the stories he relates.

Sima Qian was emphatic about the importance of women in Chi- nese history. Given the hierarchical nature of ancient Chinese society, the women who mattered most were members of the ruling families. He therefore includes detailed stories about influential women, such as Empress Lii. Her history raises questions not only about the tradi- tional restrictions on women's roles in society but also about whether women had the same desire for power and ability to rule that men did (Document 10).

Since his goal was to record the history of the world (that is, the world of China and its neighbors), Sima Qian had to cover an im- mense amount of time and space. The beginnings of Chinese history reached back two thousand years before his time, into the realm of what today would be considered myth. For Sima Qian and his audi- ence, however, these stories about legendary rulers and their families were the true ancient history of Chinese civilization. Sima Qian's fin- ished book amounts to well over half a million words, roughly three times longer than Herodotus's. It was originally written on thousands of bamboo strips that were tied up in bundles with silk cords, much like rolled-up window shades. A wagon was required to transport the entire work.

Five-Part Structure of the Narrative

Writing such a broad history presented problems concerning how to arrange large amounts of information. Should Sima Qian proceed chronologically, trying to fit everything into one story arranged from earlier to later events? This was how some previous Chinese historical works had been structured. Or should he tell the story region by

I I

INTRODUCTION 21

region? This was how other earlier historical works, such as The Nar- rative from the States and Intrigues of the Warring States, were organ- ized. Both of these structures would require the narrative to jump around a great deal in time and space, as in Herodotus's work. Another option was to arrange the material according to themes or topics, such as politics, economy, and religion, as modern historians often do in writing world history.

Sima Qian invented a new narrative structure combining all these methods that would influence how later Chinese historians presented their work. Instead of simply proceeding in chronological order or region by region, he divided his material into five parts- "Basic Annals," "Chronological Tables," "Treatises," "Hereditary Houses," and "Biographies" -each of which was subdivided into chapters. The entire work totaled 130 chapters. (In modern editions, the letter to Ren An [Document 7] is often added at the end.) The five sections present different information about the same people, events, and re- gions (although sometimes this information is repeated in more than one section) . In "Basic Annals," for example, the emphasis is on the events of particular time periods, while in "Biographies" additional information about the personalities and actions of significant people who lived during those time periods is presented.

Since Chinese tradition taught that form carries meaning, the details of Sima Qian's new arrangement were deeply significant. By dividing his history into overlapping parts and offering different per- spectives on the same events and people, Sima Qian represents the multilevel structure of the world as human beings experience it and the open-ended nature of human perceptions about the world. 17 As such, the structure of Sima Qian's history implicitly expresses his interpretations of the past, stressing the complicated and overlapping layers of meaning that had to be teased out of a great mass of some- times confusing or contradictory information. This innovation set his work apart from all previous history writing in China.

It is not easy to translate accurately into English the titles of the five sections of Sima Qian's work, an indication of the complexity of his approach to history. The first title is usually translated as "Basic Annals" (Documents 8-10) . Subdivided into twelve chapters, this open- ing section narrates the reigns of the ruling emperors and empresses from legendary times down through the Qin and early Han dynasties.

17 For a full discussion of this idea, see Grant Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian's Conqu est of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

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22 INTRODUITION

Since this overview provides the general context for all of Chinese his- tory, it is appropriate to have it begin the work.

The second section is "Chronological Tables" or "Chronological Charts." Its ten chapters have short introductions followed by tables in grid form that relate events in different regions and reigns to chrono- logical headings. These tables have complex graphic designs that change at crucial points to accommodate the intricate spatial and chronological information that Sima Qian is interrelating (see Figure 1). The tables allow readers to scan in one direction to see what the developments in a single state were over time, while reading in the other direction reveals the events that took place each year in the dif- ferent states until the unification of the country by the First Emperor of Qin in 221 BCE. This section fittingly comes right after "Basic Annals" because it shows in concrete ways how time and space must be interrelated for history to make sense.

The third part of the book has the title "Treatises" or "Mono- graphs." Its eight chapters are essays on topics ranging from the rela- tionship of the gods and human beings to calendar reform, music and rituals, the management of rivers and canals, and the economy. They show that although history is full of both large-scale trends and major changes, all of these are caused by or have direct effects on individu- als, especially those in power.

The title of the fourth section is "Hereditary Houses." Most of its thirty chapters tell the stories of important families that held official positions or received other benefits granted by the rulers that were inherited by subsequent generations. These families were constantly involved in the struggles for power among the competing regions before the Qin dynasty unified China. In this section, Sima Qian illus- trates the errors in character and conduct that led to the moral decay, loss of power, and eventual disappearance of most of these once domi- nant families. A few chapters in "Hereditary Houses" concern individ- uals instead of families. Chapter 47, for example, is the earliest biography of Confucius. It is possible that these unusual chapters appear in this section because the individuals described, like the longest-lived hereditary houses, had families and reputations that lasted until Sima Qian's time. What is certain is that Sima Qian wanted to stress the importance of Confucius's ideas as a guide to how people should live in the present time.

Sima Qian's final section is commonly known as "Biographies" (Documents 11-14). Its seventy chapters constitute about a third of the book and mainly record the lives of individuals whose memory

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24 INTRODUCTION

Sima Qian wished to preserve. (In this goal, he resembles Herodotus.) These chapters describe both individuals and types of people, such as authors of handbooks on war (Document 12), assassins and retainers (Document 13), and barbarians (Document 14). He tells these bio- graphical stories with passion and detail, emphasizing information that illustrates individuals' moral strengths and weaknesses. He says that writing them was hard work, involving "doubt, danger, and choice," but was worth doing because he believed that the decisions and fates of individual people are the major factor in history. He also believed that personal stories have much to teach others about how to live properly. His work inspired the emphasis on biography found in later Chinese history and literature.

Like Herodotus, Sima Qian reports that divine power, frequently identified simply as "Heaven," has a role to play in history but does not directly control human fate. Like Herodotus, he gives the greatest weight to the actions of individuals as the causes of events, rather than to impersonal trends or interventionist gods. Therefore, he includes a great deal of dialogue and many speeches that reveal the intentions and will of human actors. His comment at the end of his chapter on Confucius is a hint to his audience about how they should think about the people he describes: "I try to imagine what sort of person he was."

One way to think about Sima Qian's arrangement of his material in different sections is to see all his sections as supplements to one another, similar in intention to the supplements that characterize Herodotus's work (which has no divisions that we can attribute to the historian himself). Unlike Herodotus, however, Sima Qian's pro- cess of supplementation is systematic, operating through interconnec- tions between information presented in different parts of his book. His work's enormous length (and lack of an index) shows that he, like Herodotus, expected his audience to do a great deal of thinking on their own to make connections between related stories told in differ- ent sections. He believed that effort was important, because to study the past was, to use Sima Qian's metaphor, "to provide a mirror for oneself" that reflected what was good and what was not in one's char- acter and actions.

Moral Judgments

Sima Qian, like Herodotus, expresses both direct and indirect moral judgments in his historical work. In the sections concerning early Chi- nese history, he frequently represents Grand Astrologers (the position

INTRODUCTION 25

he held) as giving moral advice to rulers and predicting disasters that would result if the rulers behaved improperly. He records, for example, that the Grand Astrologer Bo Yang served the evil King You of the Zhou dynasty. 18 Bo Yang warned the king that he was doing wrong by falling in love with Lady Si. He expressed this criticism by reading to the king historical records revealing that Si had been conceived when her mother mated with a lizard born from the spit of dragons of the Xia dynasty. (Like Herodotus, Sima Qian includes mythical stories and leaves open the question of whether they are important because they are true or only because people believe them.) Bo Yang expressed his moral stature as Grand Astrologer by predicting the fall of the Zhou dynasty due to the king's immoral conduct.

In seeing history writing as a means of uncovering and expressing moral judgments, Sima Qian was following a long-standing Chinese tradition. Since Chinese rulers and imperial officials were expected to use historical examples to justify their policies and actions, they were the primary audience for historical writing. It is, therefore, no accident that the moral judgments that Sima Qian expresses mainly concern the character and conduct of people in power. Sometimes he offers his judgments at the ends of chapters, while other times he simply quotes what others said about the moral lesson of a particular story. Some- times he points his audience to a more subtle and complex form of moral judgment, especially when he reports a person's virtue and good conduct in one story and the same person's faults or crimes in another. Sima Qian evidently intended his audience to compare over- lapping stories to make a meaningful analysis of a person's character and conduct.

Expressing moral judgments about the emperor was very danger- ous in Sima Qian's situation. Given Emperor Wu's suspicious and vengeful nature, it would have been deadly for Sima Qian if the emperor saw himself portrayed in a negative way in The Records of the Historian. Could this be why Sima Qian's original chapters on his own time did not survive?19 No one can say with certainty. Surely Sima Qian, remembering his model, Confucius, realized the potentially dan- gerous consequences of writing contemporary history with moral implications under the rule of a suspicious emperor ready to punish

18Sima Qian, The Records of the Historian, chap. 4. 1 9These chapters were already absent when Sima Qian's work was "discovered" in

the Later Han dynasty. Later writers composed substitute chapters, which do not con- tain material critical of Emperor Wu.

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26 INTRODUcriON

for even a hint of criticism. Given the Chinese tradition that the past was a guide for correcting the errors of the present, Sima Qian's his- tory of ancient events and rulers could be taken as criticism of the current emperor and his government. In any case, Sima Qian clearly states that he did not publicize his work or present the emperor with a copy of his book: "I shall store it on a famous mountain [not named here], to await those who will understand it and spread it throughout the countryside and all the capitals" (Document 7). Reportedly, Sima Qian's work only became known two generations later, when his grandson made it public.

Sima Qian had an enormous impact on later Chinese historical writ- ing. Every one of the twenty-six dynasties of imperial China commis- sioned official histories following a simplified version of the structure pioneered by Sima Qian. These dynastic histories, called "standard histories," included basic annals, biographies, and sometimes trea- tises. They also had a moral purpose: They were meant to explain why the new dynasty was the proper and just successor to the fallen- and therefore necessarily corrupt- former dynasty and why the new rulers rightly enjoyed the Mandate of Heaven (divine approval of the regime). Unlike Sima Qian, the official historians who wrote these standard histories were following the emperor's orders and seeking his approval, so they could not afford to include controversial material about the contemporary regime.

CONCLUSION: COMPARING HERODOTUS AND SIMA QIAN

Comparing Herodotus and Sima Qian provides an opportunity to examine the patterns and purposes in the writing of history across cul- tures and across time. Identifying the ways in which their works are similar and different can help us formulate, though perhaps not defini- tively answer, questions about whether universal human behaviors and values exist cross-culturally and how and why regional differences emerge in human societies. The main question that the selections in this book are meant to illuminate is how and why Herodotus and Sima Qian made moral judgments and interpretations part of their histories and thereby made them part of their audiences' experience in thinking about the past.

At the time Herodotus finished his history, Greece had attained in less than a century levels of prosperity and cultural achievement

INTRODUCTION 27

unimaginable at the time of his birth. The development of coinage had made local and international trade possible at a greater level than ever before. Prosperous cities, especially Athens, spent lavishly on military forces to wage nearly constant wars against other Greeks, as well as on spectacular displays of their wealth, such as marble buildings and temples and elaborate festivals featuring parades, music, and drama. Like Croesus, Greeks in this period believed themselves to be "bless- edly fortunate" (Document 1).

It is, therefore, striking to notice that Herodotus ended his book with stories of cruelty and revenge, capped by an anecdote that jumps back in time to Cyrus's founding of the Persian Empire (Document 6). The anecdote records Cyrus's remark to the Persians when they wanted to move away from their rough homeland to find a more prosperous life: "Soft men grow from soft countries." The Persians then decided to abandon the quest for wealth so that they would not "live as slaves to other people." It seems likely that Herodotus meant for the prosperous Greeks of his time to consider the examples of the cycles of success and failure experienced by states and individuals in the past. That required his audience to look for interconnections between various events described in his history and to form their own judgments about the individuals involved in those events. In this way, Herodotus might have hoped that his goal of ensuring that people remember and evaluate the past would be fulfilled.

Sima Qian also composed his history when his country had changed greatly in the course of about a century. The unification of China into an empire ruled by a single person led to centralized politi- cal authority and increased trade with and knowledge of peoples to the west, who had developed civilizations of their own. The Han dynasty emperors developed an imperial bureaucracy to handle trade, taxes, and other essential activities. They tried to ensure the loyalty of the bureaucrats by hiring them on the basis of merit and not whether they belonged to an elite family. The emperors made education in principles derived from the writings of Confucius the key requirement for obtaining an imperial position because it instilled respect for hier- archy and deference to authority. Under this system, the power of the emperor and his officials was absolute.

Sima Qian experienced the pain that this unlimited power could inflict on individuals judged to be disloyal. It seems reasonable to think that his history has so much to say about Confucius's ideas and individuals in power because those two themes were so important in his world. The Chinese believed that examples of behavior in the past

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28 INTRODUCf!ON

provided the best models for living an upright life in the present. Therefore, writing a history describing such examples was one way to offer guidance both to all-powerful rulers and to those they ruled. These examples carried the moral authority bestowed by tradition in Sima Qian's world. Sima Qian gave his history a complicated structure because he recognized that the moral lessons it offered were not simple and he expected his audience to think hard to understand his interpretations. He also realized that because his culture regarded his- tory as a powerful source of potential criticism of the present, he could not risk being seen as disloyal to the emperor. Therefore, he hid it away for later generations to discover.

What links the work of Herodotus and Sima Qian is their mutual goal that people would study their works about the past as guides to life, that they would see in history a mirror of their own moral strengths and weaknesses and be encouraged to live properly. Some historians today would accept this as a fitting goal for history writing; others would not. Either way, the issue for historians of every time and place remains for them to decide their role for themselves and state their goals clearly in the work they produce.

I PART TWO I

The Documents