The National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences has planned and published Anticipating the Past and Present: A Selection of Classical Studies Research Achievements, to promote and showcase outstanding results from the projects of the National Social Science Fund of China in the field of classical studies in China during the new era. The book is divided into “Chinese Studies” and “Western Studies” sections. Due to space limitations, we have selected 34 representative research achievements from the field of classical studies to present an overview of China’s classical studies research over the past two decades or so, for the readers’ learning and reference.

This book is a comparative study of oral poetics in literate cultures, focusing on the problems of textual fluidity in the transmission of Homeric poetry over half a millennium, from the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods of ancient Greece.

The book examines the metaphysics and dialectical method of Maximus the Confessor (582-662), one of the most profound and complex Byzantine thinkers.

The quantity of texts, the chronological extension of the documentation and the great typological variety of languages ​​in contact in the Mediterranean area allow us to test the most up-to-date theories and techniques on the subject of correlations between the history of societies and the evolution of languages: Greek and Latin above all, in all their phases, but also Palestinian Aramaic from the time of Jesus, Arabic and Hebrew, the languages ​​of ancient Anatolia, up to Italian and the Romance languages. The volume collects the results of a research on "Change and contact between varieties in the linguistic diachrony of the Mediterranean", in which the universities of Bergamo, Rome "Sapienza", Siena "Stranieri", Trieste and Viterbo "Tuscia" participated.

In 12 chapters, which summarize the most important themes of the two historical works, this book traces the differences between the views of their authors. At the same time, it shows the conditions under which the genre of standard Chinese history was able to flourish.

This book trys to place the early Chinese poetic culture in the larger context of religious, political, and philosophical thought and practice.

The first "modernist" movement of Roman poetry appeared around the middle of the 1st century BC. century, and its representatives, the Younger, compiled the selections of the most important poets of the previous Alexandrian-Hellenistic period.