Emperor Whisperers charts a comparative history of the two largest strains of ancient philosophy, from the first millennium BC to around AD 500. The book examines how

philosophy arose from atheism in both China and Greece but entered a cul de sac when atheism spread from the elites to the middle classes. China's philosophy evolved to oppose law with morals, which created a mandarin class of "emperor whisperers," while Western philosophy was complicated by competing political systems that were only harmonized by the triumph of the Roman Empire. As antiquity came to an end, imported new religions - Buddhism and Christianity - reintroduced faith into elite thought and kickstarted the Middle Ages.

David Roman was born in Madrid in 1973. After a long career as a foreign correspondent with the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News, mostly in the Asia-Pacific region, he started work on Emperor Whisperers, his first non-fiction book, in 2016. David is married with two children and currently lives in Washington, D.C. He's the head writer for the History of Mankind project, available at https://mankind.substack.com/.