Roma Sinica and Confucius and Cicero: extending the boundaries and constructing relationships

This volume marks the official birth of the new De Gruyter series Roma Sinica: Mutual Interactions between Ancient Roman and Eastern Thought.1 This series2 aims to cover a gap in scholarly publishing on the relationships between Ancient Greek and Roman culture and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese thought, and to draw a more precise picture of these connections, focusing on subjects such as philology, literature, philosophy, politics. In fact, the number of studies on the historical features of the contacts between Ancient East and West has grown in recent years, as testified by certain works.3 However, even if we are satisfied with our level of knowledge of historical and economic connections, we cannot say the same for the history of thought in its various facets. For instance, ancient evidence about connections among ancient Roman, Greek, and Chinese authors is very poor. But, in the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, the Jesuit fathers, such as Ricci, Intorcetta, and Longobardi, described and discussed in many passages of their books the thought of Chinese philosophers and writers by using their own cultural memories as cultivated Western men. These writers were well-versed not only in Christian texts and the Vulgate, but also in Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and many other ancient authors. They read ‘their’ China, ‘their’ Korea, and ‘their’ Japan with the eyes of men deeply rooted in their culture, making comparisons – implicit or explicit – between Confucius, Meng Zhou, and Roman writers. Moreover, they composed their books in Latin and had thus to develop effective linguistic strategies to allow Western readers to understand Eastern thought. This fact authorizes us to investigate the modality, the features