Setting the stage: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman constellations -- Starting avant la lettre: an essay on how to tell the beginnings of literature and eloquence -- Latecomers: of ornament, simplicity, and decline -- City-building or writing? : how Aeneas and Prince Shôtoku made Rome and Japan -- Rome and Kyoto: capitals, genres, gender -- Poetry in exile: Sugawara no michizane and Ovid -- Satire in foreign attire: the ambivalences of learning in late antiquity and medieval Japan -- The synoptic machine: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman juxtapositions.