The two of the Four Books of the Confucian Classics that are presented today to the Greek reader do not exceed a few dozen pages together. However, as A. Plaks characteristically evaluates, in the long and uninterrupted course of Chinese spirituality, they exerted such a deep and extensive influence on the people of the Far East that they can rightfully be compared, from this perspective, to the great religious and philosophical texts of the Western world. In their historical journey, the two texts acquired mainly educational significance as they constituted the core of the education of young people, but also the main aid in the preparation of scholars for Imperial examinations at the three levels. At the same time, they proved to be one of the main sources of the extensive "body" of interpretive Commentaries, as well as a repository of concepts and terminology for later Confucian texts (especially in the periods of Tang and Song). Finally (especially the text Da Xue, it is true), they are an important reference even for scholars who in the early 20th century opposed the core of Chinese tradition, denouncing its "feudal" and "unscientific" character.

With a sense of satisfaction and joy, Indiktos presents to the reader the translation of these two important texts of the Confucian Classics into Greek. A translation that we owe to Sotiris Halikias, who with great care and effort managed, after the Analects and the Book of Mencius, to complete the ambitious and demanding endeavor of translating into our language these distinct, but also so interesting, views of man and the world, as they are contained in the Four Books.