The New Lifetime Reading Plan

up to the second century b.c.e.; ten chapters of dynastic tables and genealogies; eight treatises on such subjects as ritual, music, calendrical astronomy, water resources, and the agricultural economy; thirty chapters on the great royal and aristocratic fam- ilies of the Chou era and the Warring States Period prior to the unification of China; and seventy chapters of biographies (some individual, some collective) of prominent people of ali walks of life, from statesmen and generais to bandits and court jesters.

In its sheer scope the Shih chi is a remarkable work. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is how interesting, even entertain- ing, it is to read today. This is in part because Ssu-ma Ch^en was a superb prose stylist in Classical Chinese (which has encour- aged the literary efforts of his translators), and in part because his attitude toward the writing of history still strikes us as so modern. With Thucydides [9], he was one of the fathers of sci- entific history; he was careful to use only those earlier chronicles and historical documents that he thought were demonstrably accurate. He searched for old archives in the former capitais of defunct warring states; for recent history, he had access to, and quoted frequently from, documents in the Han imperial library.

His efforts to record the past conscientiously have stood the test of time. At the beginning of the twentieth century certain scholars applying modern Western criticai methods proclaimed their "discovery" that the kings of the ancient Shang Dynasty (ca. 1500-1050 b.c.e.) named by Ssu-ma Cfrien had never existed at ali. Within a few years, however, archaeological exca- vations vindicated the ancient historian; the evidence showed that his genealogy of the Shang kings was entirely correct. It is quite amazing that Ssu-ma Ch^en could have written about rulers a thousand years before his own time with such accuracy.

The Shih chi was completed under circumstances of heroic moral fortitude. Ssu-ma Cfrien^ monarch, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, was one of Chinas greatest emperors, vigorous, far-sighted, and martial; he vastly extended the territory under Chinese rule. He was also a tyrant who reacted ferociously to any suggestion of disloyalty, as Ssu-ma Ch'ien learned to his sorrow. A

certain general was punished for suffering a disastrous defeat on the northern frontier; Ssu-ma Ch'ien spoke up in the generaPs defense. For this temerity, he was condemned to be castrated. The expected outcome of this sentence was that he would com- mit suicide to spare himself a humiliating fate, but in a moving letter to a friend, he explained that he was willing to live on as a eunuch in order to bring his great work to completion. History is in his debt, not only for his own work, but because the Shih chi became the model for twenty-four subsequent official dynastic histories—each new dynasty considered it a sacred duty to write a history of its predecessor; so even did the Republic of China, which overthrew the monarchy in 1911. This continuous histori­cal record from the second century b.c.e. to the twentieth cen­tury is unmatched by any other culture in the world.

For the modern reader, Burton Watson's Records of the Grand Historian of China is overwhelmingly the best translation of the Shih chi. I recommend that you read, in Volume I of Watson's translation, Shih chi chapters 6 ("Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Chm"), 68 ("Biography of Lord Shang"), and 87 ("Biography of Li Ssu"); and in Volume II, chapters 30 ("Treatise on the Balanced Standard" [i.e., money and taxation]), 110 ("Account of the Hsiung-nu"), 118 ("Biographies of the Kings of Huai-nan and Heng-shan"), 121 ("Biographies of the Confucian Scholars"), 124 ("Biographies of the Wandering Knights"), and 129 ("Biographies of the Money-makers^>>). I think that once you start you will want to read this book from cover to cover.

J.S.M.

19

LUCRETIUS

ca. 100-ca. 50 b.c.e. Of the Nature of Things

Of Lucretius we know virtually nothing. A tradition states that he was driven mad by a love potion and that he ended his own life. This note of violence is at least not contradicted by the vein of passionate intensity running through his great and strange poem, De Rerum Natura.

We do not today cast our explanations of the physical and moral world into hexameters. But in classic times poetry was often the vehicle of instruction and propaganda. Lucretius's poem is such a vehicle.