-
Diogenes and Alexander
戴奥吉尼斯和亚历山大
The
Dog Has His Day
Gilbert Highet
This
article
by
the
late
classicist
Gilbert
Highet
describes
a
meeting
between
two
sharply
contrasting personalities of history:
Alexander the Great and Diogenes. This selection
originally
appeared in Horizon, the
first in a series entitled Great Confrontations.
此文是由晚期著名的古典学者
Gilbert Highet
所写，描述了历史上两位性格极端伟大人物的
会面场面：亚历山
大国王和戴奥吉尼斯。本文选择来自
Horizon
，一篇名叫“伟大的会面”
的开始部分。
Lying on the bare earth, shoeless,
bearded, half-naked, he looked like a beggar or a
lunatic(
神经病
,
疯子
).
He
was
one,
but
not
the
other.
He
had
opened
his
eyes
with
the
sun
at
dawn
(
拂晓
),
scratched, done his business like a dog
at the roadside, washed at the public fountain,
begged a
piece of breakfast bread and a
few olives, eaten them squatting on the ground,
and washed them
down with a few
handfuls of water scooped from the spring. (Long
ago he had owned a rough
wooden cup,
but he threw it away when he saw a boy drinking
out of his hollowed hands.) Having
no
work to go to and no family
to provide
for, he was free. As the market place filled up
with
shoppers and merchants and
gossipers and sharpers (a cheater, esp. a
cardsharper) and slaves and
foreigners,
he had strolled through it for an hour or two.
Everybody knew him, or knew of him.
They would throw sharp questions at him
and get sharper answers. Sometimes they threw
jeers,
and got jibes; sometimes bits of
food, and got scant thanks; sometimes a
mischievous pebble, and
got a shower of
stones and abuse(
漫骂
).
They were not quite sure whether he was
mad or not.
He
knew they
were mad, all mad, each in a different way; they
amused him. Now he was
back at his
home. (
周围的人们不能肯定他到底是不是真的疯了
,<
/p>
但是他确是非常的肯定他们
是真的疯了
,
以不同的方式和程度
;
这个发现使他很开心好玩
).
It
was
not
a
house,
not
even
a
squatter's
hut.
He
thought
everybody
lived
far
too
elaborately,
expensively,
anxiously. What good is a house? No one needs
privacy: natural acts are not shameful;
we all do the same thing, and need not
hide them. No one needs beds and chairs and such
furniture:
the animals live healthy
lives and sleep on the ground. All we require,
since nature did not dress us
properly,
is one garment to keep us warm, and some shelter
from rain and wind. So he had one
blanket
—
to dress
him in the daytime and cover him at
night
—
and he slept in a
cask. His name
was Diogenes. He was the
founder of the creed called Cynicism (the word
means
he spent much of his life in the
rich, lazy, corrupt Greek city of Corinth, mocking
and satirizing its
people, and
occasionally converting one of them.
His
home was not a barrel made of wood: too expensive.
It was a storage jar made of earthenware,
something like a modern fuel
tank
—
no doubt discarded
because a break had made it useless. He
was not the first to inhabit such a
thing: the refugees driven into Athens by the
Spartan invasion
had been forced to
sleep in casks. But he was the first who ever did
so by choice, out of principle.
Diogenes
was
not
a
degenerate
or
a
maniac(
疯子
).
He was
a
philosopher
who
wrote
plays
and
poems and essays
expounding(
解释
) his doctrine;
he talked to those who cared to listen; he had
pupils who admired him. But he taught
chiefly by example. All should live naturally, he
said, for
what
is
natural
is
normal
and
cannot
possibly
be
evil
or
shameful.
Live
without
conventions,
which are artificial and false; escape
complexities and superfluities and extravagances:
only so can
you live a free life.
The rich man believes he possesses his
big house with its many rooms and
its
elaborate furniture, his pictures and expensive
clothes, his horses and his servants and his
bank
accounts.
He
does
not.
He
is
their
slave.
In
order
to
procure
a
quantity
of
false,
perishable goods he
has sold the only true, lasting good, his own
independence.
(
富人们都相
信
,
< br>拥有了属于自己的豪华大房子
,
房间很多
,
装饰和家具都很精致和气派
,
还有很多的名画
和很昂贵的衣服
, <
/p>
马匹和佣人，
还有银行账户上的很多的钱。
实际上不是！
而是它们的奴隶。
为了获取一个大量的不实际和
及其容易腐烂的东西，他们把自己唯一真实闪光的，可以持
续长久的东西给出卖了，那就
是自己的独立人格。
There have
been
many
men
who
grew
tired
of
human
society
with
its
complications,
and
went
away to live
simply
—
on a small farm, in a
quiet village, in a hermit's cave, or in the
darkness of
anonymity. Not so Diogenes.
He was not a recluse(
归隐者
) or
a stylite(
修行者
), or a beatnik
(
奇异
怪装
,
颓废的一代
). He was a missionary. His life's
aim was clear to him: it was
currency.
philosophy, and
this phrase was Diogenes' bold, unembarrassed joke
on the subject.) To restamp
the
currency: to take the clean metal of human life,
to erase the old false conventional markings,
and to imprint it with its true values.
The other great philosophers of the
fourth century before Christ taught mainly their
own private
pupils. In the shady groves
and cool sanctuaries of the Academy, Plato
discoursed to a chosen few
on
the
unreality
of
this
contingent
existence.
Aristotle,
among
the
books
and
instruments
and
specimens
and
archives
and
research-workers
of
his
Lyceum,
pursued
investigations
and
gave
lectures
that
were
rightly
named
esoteric,
those
within
the
walls.
But
for
Diogenes,
laboratory and specimens and lecture
halls and pupils were all to be found in a crowd
of ordinary
people. Therefore, he chose
to live in Athens or in the rich city of Corinth,
where travelers from all
over the
Mediterranean world constantly came and went. And,
by design, he publicly behaved in
such
ways as to show people what real life was. He
would constantly take up their spiritual coin,
ring it on a stone, and laugh at its
false superscription.
He
thought
most
people
were
only
half-alive,
most
men
only
half-
men.
At
bright
noonday he
walked
through
the
market
place
carrying
a
lighted
lamp
and
inspecting
the
face
of
everyone
he met. They asked him why. Diogenes answered,
（在
他的眼里，大多数的人都只是半个生命，大多数的人都是半个人。
在正中午的时候，他举
着一个点燃的蜡烛，走在熙熙攘攘的市场里，检查和审视着每个人
的脸。人们问这是他干
什么
,
戴奥吉尼斯
回答说，
“我在试图找到一个真正的人。
”
To a gentleman whose servant was
putting on his shoes for him, Diogenes said,
really
happy
until
he
wipes
your
nose
for
you:
that
will
come
after
you
lose
the
use
of
your
hands.
Once there was
a war-scare so serious that it stirred even the
lazy, profit-happy Corinthians. They
began to drill, clean their weapons,
and rebuild their neglected fortifications.
Diogenes took his
old cask and began to
roll it up and down, back and forward.
And so he
lived
—
like a dog, some said,
because he cared nothing for privacy and other
human
conventions, and because he
showed his teeth and barked at those whom he
disliked. Now he was
lying in the
sunlight, as contented as a dog on the warm
ground, happier (he himself used to boast)
than the Shah of Persia. Although he
knew he was going to have an important visitor, he
would
not move.
The
little
square
began
to
fill
with
people.
Page
boys
elegantly
dressed,
spear
men
speaking
a
rough
foreign
dialect,
discreet
secretaries,
hard-browed
officers,
suave
diplomats,
they
all
gradually formed a
circle centered on Diogenes. He looked them over
as a sober man looks at a
crowd of
tottering drunks, and shook his head. He knew who
they were. They were the attendants
of
the conqueror of Greece, the servants of
Alexander, the Macedonian king, who was visiting
his
newly subdued realm.
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