Zhou Zuoren and the Uses of Ancient Greek Mythology in Modern China

Abstract

Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), one of the foremost essayists in modern China, produced many exquisite Chinese translations of ancient Greek mythology and literature, as well as numerous essays on various aspects of ancient Greek culture. Making use of this rich body of work hitherto rarely explored, this essay addresses the following questions: what uses does a culture such as China, which has been essentially non-mythological in its long tradition, make of Greek mythology? What relevance does Greek mythology have at the two critical moments in modern Chinese history that Zhou lived through, i.e. the May-Fourth movement and its aftermath, and the post-1949 era up to the beginning of the ‘cultural revolution’? I approach these questions from two interrelated points of view: myth and knowledge and myth and literature. I argue that Zhou’s uses of Greek mythology formed an integral part of a cultural project aimed at defending free thought, which, as Zhou perceptively foresaw, was to be destroyed at the hands of self-claimed “progressive” intellectuals. This reassessment of Zhou’s thought via his life-long work in Greek mythology not only offers a better understanding of his aesthetics and cultural criticism, but also opens up a new perspective to the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in modern Chinese intellectual history.