This chapter explores the idea of gendered social performance through the texts of Plutarch and Sima Qian. Chandra Giroux investigates two categories of social performance in particular: friendship and authority, and death and grief. Both categories are approached from the perspective of each author’s own social performance in these scenarios as well as how they represent the social performance of women in them. Through an investigation of Plutarch’s and Sima Qian’s self-representations of their own social performances, she argues that both authors attempt to establish themselves as exemplary figures, ones that focus on the idea of the maintenance of harmony. In this way, Plutarch’s and Sima Qian’s actions are meant as a mirror for their readers’ own lives. In comparison, the chapter analyzes the examples of Timokleia and Timoxena in Plutarch’s corpus, as well as that of Nie Ying in Sima Qian’s work, to explore the authors’ notions of the ideal female reaction to friendship and authority, as well as that of death and grief. In this analysis, Giroux finds that both authors’ representations of women are based in the gender expectations of their respective societies. It is thus the differences between their cultures’ approaches to gender relations that dictate how Plutarch and Sima Qian understood the ideal female reaction to death, grief, friendship, and authority.

The Art of War and Sunzi’s modern image outside China must be placed within their original Chinese context. The mythical author and “his” text served a specific function in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian that, given the seminal nature of the Records of the Grand Historian in creating many of the categories and interpretations of pre-imperial and very early imperial history, have persisted until the present. Samuel Griffith connected Sunzi to Mao Zedong, the great Chinese military genius of the twentieth century, in order to make Sunzi relevant to Western readers. He also connected Sunzi back to ancient Chinese history to establish that, if Mao was the most recent manifestation of strategic acumen, the foundation of that thought was basic to Chinese culture. Sunzi was an ancient classic that was not only an enduring piece of strategic truth, but also a description of warfare in premodern China.

In this last chapter, I focus exclusively on the monumental work of history the Shiji, by Sima Qian, the Grand Archivist at the court of Emperor Wu of the Han empire. Out of the 130 chapters of the Shiji, I focus on the two, namely the “Huozhi Liezhuan” and the “Pingzhun shu,” that primarily deal with the economic history of the entire civilized world, up to the time of the Han empire. I argue that Sima Qian mobilized historical narratives to offer a sharp critique of what he perceived to be the problems with Han imperialism as it developed under Emperor Wu. The Shiji, in this sense, was a critical deployment of the field of the past; Sima Qian engaged with the past less to advance a new political order than to deconstruct an existing one. The Shiji was a critique all the way down.