Who Was Sun Tzu's Napoleon?

Alone among the military theorists whose works have reached the ranks of the strategic canon, the background and motivation of Sun Tzu—the purported author of The Art of War—remain shrouded in conjecture and doubt.[2] We know that Thucydides was not only the chronicler, but a general in the Peloponnesian War, Julius Caesar the architect of the Gallic War, and Machiavelli an active participant in Florentine diplomatic and martial affairs. Maurice de Saxe waded through the bloody fields of Malplaquet and Fontenoy, while both Jomini and Clausewitz kept their own formative experiences fighting in the Napoleonic Wars firmly in mind as they composed their respective theoretical works. But what motivated Sun Tzu (or its anonymous authors) to compose The Art of War? What were its historical precedents?