People are not going to like the conclusions of the author...

Conclusions:

At the intellectual level, though both the Roman and Chinese empires were culture states, their cultures differed in the spectrums they covered. Intellectual activity may be plotted against a grid formed by two axes; a horizontal axis of meaning, according to which thought is either paradigmatic or syntagmatic, that is, rhetorical or realist; a vertical axis of intention according to which thought is either categorical or critical, that is, directed to objects or to its own processes. This grid, itself a piece of low-level critical thinking, provides a fourfold spectrum: paradigmatic and categorical, categorical and syntagmatic, syntagmatic and critical, critical and paradigmatic. In terms of this spectrum, the bodies of thought most characteristic of Han China, and transmitted to the San-guo and the Jin, were concentrated in the two paradigmatic quadrants. China was strong in literature, poetry especially, and in literary criticism. It was less strong in the categorical and syntagmatic quadrant especially in metaphysics and cosmology, though in historical scholarshiip, Sima Qian may be accorded second place above Herodotus but below Thucydides. Categorical realism was inhibited by the shift within the Confucian tradition from the xin-wen jia, the New Text school, to the gu-wen jia, the Old Text school, which occurred during the usurpation of Wang Mang. This shift represented a move away from the correlative cosmology of Dong Zhong-shu and before him of Zou Yen back to the literary paradigms of the classics themselves. Empirical theories, for example in medicine, were resignified as a priori categories. Han thought was weakest in the syntagmatic and critical quadrant, but there, until the late middle ages, the West was not much stronger. Prescinding for the moment from religion, because in AD 400 Christianity had conquered in the West while Buddhism and Taoism had not yet done so in China, the West's intellectual preeminence lay in its competing cosmologies: the rival syntheses of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotins and the Atomists as transmitted to the Roman world by Lucretius. These represented a decisive extension of thought from the paradigmatic to the syntagmatic. Without such an extension, thought remained confined in mythology in Levi-Strauss' sense of mental exercises and preparatory categorization. Chinese myth might be aniconic or historicized, rather than rooted in epic as in the Mediterranean or India, but myth it remained."

"If the West covered a wider intellectual spectrum in Antiquity than China, it also did so in a greater range of languages and ????s. Translation, it has been claimed, was the great discovery of the Hellenistic world. Though Greek and Latin were initially the only classical languages, by the end of Antiquity their number had been extended to include Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian and Ethiopian, sometimes with new ????s. Meanwhile, the Chinese paideia remained monoglot and monographic though the Chinese language itself was being enriched by Iranian loan words to do with wheeled transport, medicine and magic through contacts with a wider world in Central Asia."

"China did not yet possess a Sinosphere or effective institutions of translation. It remained shut up within its own ???? and texts separated by mental and physical barriers from the rest of civilization. It was the resulting sense of isolation and provinciality which had driven emperor Han Wudi to send his emissaries to the West and from the middle of the third century AD sent Chinese Buddhist prilgrims int he same direction. It was a state of affairs which the next half millennium was to reverse radically."

"Civilizations are seldom superior or inferior to each other in all respects. They are not blocs, but aggregates and distinctions between levels and within levels must be drawn. That said, if an overall judgement has to be made, it is difficult not to conclude that around AD 400 the Roman world was more advanced than the Chinese world. China might have the better economic infrastructure, on which a great future was going to be built, but in terms of superstructure--political, social and intellectual--Rome held centre-stage.