-
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
,
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
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
,
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
,
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(<
/p>
奇异怪装
,
颓废
的一代
). He was a missionary. His life's
aim was clear to him: it was
restamp
the currency.
counterfeiting, long
before he turned to 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,
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