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The crisis of humanism, postcolonial studies, and gender studies have converged to deconstruct the incomparable exemplarity of the ancient Greek and Latin authors and the idea that Europe or the Western world were their privileged heirs. By de-familiarizing and de-territorializing them, they raised them to the status of textbook cases for the epistemology of comparative studies. They invite us to rethink the value of universality, which was previously associated with myths and the classics, suggesting a grounding of comparative literature in the notion of distribution, in both senses of dividing and sharing.