Zhou zuoren’s devotee of ancient Greek literature is noteworthy, because ofhis aesthetic of the literary works. When he had studied in Japan, he hadlearned ancient Greek philology from Henry St. George Tucker who was a priestof American Anglican Church. They used the textbook which was written byPlaton and Xenophon, but Zhou didn’t show any interest in those. From thattime, Zhou had eagerly read works that was written by Theokritos, Herondas,Lukianos, Longos as a second-rate writer, then had translated into Chineseand submitted on some magazines.
Andrew Lang who was a famous English anthropologist in the late 19thcentury was an important scholar that effected on Zhou’s mythology study. Theanthropological approach to Folklore pursued by Lang legitimated the role of‘the people’ in the production of culture. And Lang demonstrated the absurdityof academic tendency in a fictional parody of Tyler’s method. Zhou zuoren couldfind one of the writing styles from Lang’s works. That was very similar withChinese traditional writing style that had so-called ‘yeshi(野史)’.
In the 1960’, Zhou zuoren began to translate Lukianos’s ≪Dialogues of thedead≫ series. The translation that Zhou did was very unique, because of theselected Chinese words and footnotes that was reflected by Zhou’s scholarship.
Zhou zuoren thought that role of literature was to express human lives’ truththrough fictional narrative as well as historical things. Zhou zuoren’s works oftranslation was not only introduction about an ancient Greek work, but alsowas a sort of substitute for his literature theory.