155-220]. There is hardly any room for doubt that the earliest
commentary on Sun Tzŭ actually came from the pen of this extraordinary
man, whose biography in the _San Kuo Chih_ reads like a romance. One of
the greatest military geniuses that the world has seen, and Napoleonic
in the scale of his operations, he was especially famed for the
marvelous rapidity of his marches, which has found expression in the
line "Talk of Ts’ao Ts’ao, and Ts’ao Ts’ao will appear." Ou-yang Hsiu
says of him that he was a great captain who "measured his strength
against Tung Cho, Lu Pu and the two Yuan, father and son, and
vanquished them all; whereupon he divided the Empire of Han with Wu and
Shu, and made himself king. It is recorded that whenever a council of
war was held by Wei on the eve of a far-reaching campaign, he had all
his calculations ready; those generals who made use of them did not
lose one battle in ten; those who ran counter to them in any particular
saw their armies incontinently beaten and put to flight." Ts’ao Kung’s
notes on Sun Tzŭ, models of austere brevity, are so thoroughly
characteristic of the stern commander known to history, that it is hard
indeed to conceive of them as the work of a mere _littérateur_.
Sometimes, indeed, owing to extreme compression, they are scarcely
intelligible and stand no less in need of a commentary than the text
itself. [40]