The problem for Sima Qian, as for all historians, was how to organise his picture of the past. To use Western analogies, should it use narrative like Herodotus or Polybius, biography like Plutarch, or analysis of institutions like Aristotle? If those comparisons seem to exaggerate the intellectual originality of a writer two millennia ago, they are there simply to point out that intuitively, and perhaps consciously, Sima perceived that, in history, no one approach will do.
