I am stepping beyond my competence here (how else do we learn?), but today I heard a passage from Ovid and it struck me.  It was from the Metamorphoses (in this version, Book 15, section 176):

"Since I am launched into the open sea
and I have given my full sails to the wind,
nothing in all the world remains unchanged.
All things are in a state of flux, all shapes
receive a changing nature. Time itself
glides on with constant motion, ever as
a flowing river. Neither river nor
the fleeting hour can stop its constant course.
But, as each wave drives on a wave, as each
is pressed by that which follows, and must press
on that before it, so the moments fly,
and others follow, so they are renewed.
The moment which moved on before is past,
and that which was not, now exists in Time,
and every one comes, goes, and is replaced.

How marvelously Taoist.  Everything is change and flux – rather like Zhuagzi's embrace of transformation.  A water metaphor, which everyone seems to like, Confucians as well as Daoists.  A sense of uniqueness of the moment: this time is here now and then gone…

I don't imagine that Ovid was actually influenced by Chinese thinking.  Was there enough movement between Italy and China in, say, 10 BCE?  I doubt it.  He was, by contrast, most likely riffing off Heraclitus, who also had a famous "everything flows" or changes trope.  And Ovid was also likely influenced by the earlier Greek notion of Logos, which structures or shapes the flow of change in ways that Daoists do not recognize.  Or, at least, he believed that human accomplishment can, in some cases of great men, transcend the flux (read through to the end of the linked post), an un-Daoist aspiration.

In any event, maybe the the Daoist resonance of those lines by Ovid have something to do with the time, a time before the fuller dominance of scientific rationality, a time when humans appreciated just how much they could not know or control about Nature, a time before our current arrogance that diverts us from the central truth that Ovid expresses so clearly:

All things are in a state of flux…

"Ancient Italy Ovid Banished from Rome" by William Turner

"Ovid Among the Scythians" by Eugene Delacroix