Diogenes and Alexander戴奥吉尼斯和亚历山大.docx

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1、Diogenes and Alexander 戴奥吉尼斯和亚历山大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

2、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

3、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. (L

4、ong 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)

5、 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

6、 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 squatters h

7、ut. 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 gr

8、ound. 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 blanketto dress him in the daytime and cover him at nightand he slept in a cask. His name was Diogenes. He was the founder of the creed called Cynicism (th

9、e word means doggishness); 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

10、fuel tankno 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

11、 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

12、 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

13、 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

14、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 simplyon a small farm, in a quiet village, in a hermits cave, or in the darkness of anonymity. Not so Diogenes. He was not a recluse(归隐者) or a

15、stylite(修行者), or a beatnik(奇异怪装,颓废的一代). He was a missionary. His lifes aim was clear to him: it was to restamp the currency. (He and his father had once been convicted for counterfeiting, long before he turned to philosophy, and this phrase was Diogenes bold, unembarrassed joke on the subject.) To r

16、estamp 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 A

17、cademy, 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 those within the walls. But

18、 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 b

19、ehaved 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

20、lighted lamp and inspecting the face of everyone he met. They asked him why. Diogenes answered, I am trying to find a man. 。They took it as a paradox, designed to close the awkward little scene with a polite curtain line. But Alexander meant it. He understood Cynicism as the others could not. Later

21、he took one of Diogenes pupils with him to India as a philosophical interpreter (it was he who spoke to the naked saddhus). He was what Diogenes called himself, a cosmopolites, citizen of the world.。 Like Diogenes, he admired the heroic figure of Hercules, the mighty conqueror who labors to help mankind while all others toil and sweat only for themselves. He knew that of all men then alive in the world only Alexander the conqueror and Diogenes the beggar were truly free.