Daily Translation #12

我们为何难以超越罗马

“比起现世人对我的看法，我更在乎后世人对我的评价。”古罗马最负盛名的雄辩家西塞罗在公元前59年如是说。尽管这句话是他在私下里对他的好朋友阿提库斯说的，但没有人会对此感到惊讶。西塞罗因其令人厌恶的自负而在罗马人中臭名远扬。如果有人认为西塞罗死后一千年还会有人记得他，那罗马人一定会为此欢呼雀跃。

但事实上西塞罗是一个谦逊的人。两千年已经过去了，他的话语还在启发着世人。他的身后名不仅来自于他自身的成就，还来自于那座他发迹的，令世人神往的城市。“Urbs Aeterna,”在西塞罗去世后五十年，诗人奥维德称呼罗马为“永恒之城。”罗马人统治的帝国早已衰落；他的纪念碑早已倒塌；西班牙语，意大利语和法语在他的语言上生根发芽；但是有关他的回忆永不消逝。确实，从最近席卷社交媒体的meme可以看出，在美国基本上有百万男性每天都在想有关罗马的事。

为什么？我觉得并不是出于对西塞罗和奥维德的崇拜，而是可能由于一些更加世俗化的原因。只因罗马帝国伫立于古代的顶点：强大无比，令人畏惧，受人欢迎。

如果这些要素集合在一起像在描述霸王龙，那这可能不是个巧合。罗马人就像恐龙一样，他们不仅富有魅力，其痕迹也被安全地遗留了下来。全盛罗马帝国时代已经过去了两千年。罗马富丽繁华的景象早已不再，角斗士在竞技场内洒下的鲜血早已干涸，凯撒麾下罗马军团逆我者亡的气势也早已消弭。在观看电影《角斗士》时，无论观众们多么喜欢罗素·克劳，他们也不会与电影中观看角斗的民众共情。罗马人距离我们太遥远，并不会使我们感到不安。相反，他们似乎变成了异邦人。

通过色彩，喧嚣和巧夺天工的建筑展现的力量，是激动人心的，甚至是惊心动魄的。成功的帝国深知这一点。这就解释了为什么美国和众多欧洲国家的首都的建筑都是受罗马帝国的启发。但当然，这些21世纪的建筑并不只效仿了罗马。我们知道极端自大和钢铁会导致什么后果，但国会大厦和凯旋门的设计者并不知道。随着法西斯主义的出现，西方政治中一项悠久的传统达到了可怕的高潮，然后随之而来的便是消亡。

但是世人对于权利的迷恋依旧存在。如今，只有最恶毒的怪人才会坦白自己痴迷于纳粹。但是曾在征服高卢时屠杀了一百万人和俘虏了同样人数的凯撒，其雕像依然伫立在罗马的中心，每日与不计其数的游客合影。凯撒的帝国不同于近代的帝国，他离我们太过遥远以至于我们无法追究他的罪责。

当然，这也没有解释为什么如今的美国男性会特别关注予古罗马人，而不是古埃及人，亚述人或维京人。原因可能是与其他一些古代文明相比，美国可能在古罗马上看到了扭曲的自己。就像他们一贯所做的那样。当今的美国保守派满怀憧憬地回忆那些开国元勋，认为他们开创了一个坚强独立的美德时代。而那些开国元勋们也是如此看待早期的罗马的。那时，年轻的共和国对抗强大的君主制所赢得的每一场战争都可以作为一个美德故事来振奋人心。就像美国人一样，罗马人也曾生活在君主的统治下。不甘于受君主统治，他们发起了一场英勇的起义，最后成功驱逐了国王。1832年，为纪念乔治·华盛顿诞辰一百周年，雕刻家霍雷肖·格里诺为其打造了一个宏伟的雕塑，把他塑造成了一个将权利（宝剑）归还给民众的名副其实的罗马英雄。格里诺把身着长袍，头戴假发的美国第一任总统描绘成一名英雄，这也象征着两个共和国的相似性：罗马共和国与美利坚合众国。

在21世纪，现代的美国与古罗马的相似性似乎不是那么明显。伊拉克战争，东方崛起的竞争对手，法庭上的政治报复，民粹主义对宪法传统产生的威胁，使很多人兴奋和惊愕的对“为首的将要殿后，殿后的将要为首”的极端鼓吹。比起罗马历史，人们肯定会对这些发展更为熟悉。

《角斗士》，21世纪最知名的剑与凉鞋的史诗（其续集目前在制作中），描绘了一个在许多方面既关乎过去，关乎未来的世界。民众沉浸于眼花缭乱的娱乐；军队攻击神出鬼没的外敌；还有高科技的火力武器。它是一面反映未来几十年的镜子。

如此看来，当今这么多美国人思考罗马帝国也就不足为奇了。他们在思考一个曾经既陌生又熟悉，既可怕又迷人的被安全留存下来的文明，同时也在思考他们自己的形象。

 

Original Text

Why We Can't Get Over the Roman Empire

“I worry far more what the judgement on me will be in a 1,000 years time than what the trolls are saying today.” So wrote Cicero, Rome’s most celebrated orator, in 59 BC. Although the comment was made privately to his close friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus, no one would have been surprised to read it. Cicero was notorious among his fellow citizens for the insufferable quality of his conceit. The notion that anyone would remember him a millennium after his death would have been greeted in Rome with widespread hilarity.

Yet in truth Cicero was being modest. Not one but 2,000 years have passed since his death, and still he is being quoted. His posthumous fame is tribute not just to his own achievements, but also to the enduring hold on the popular imagination of the city of which he was a citizen. “Urbs Aeterna,” the poet Ovid called Rome some 50 years after Cicero’s death: “the Eternal City.” The empire ruled by the Romans may long since have declined and fallen; its monuments crumbled into ruin; its language evolved to become Spanish, Italian, and French; but its memory remains a golden one. Indeed, according to a meme that has recently taken social media by storm, millions of men across America are apparently thinking about it every day.

Why? Not, I think, out of any particular devotion to Cicero or Ovid. The reason is likelier to be altogether more visceral. The Roman Empire was the apex predator of antiquity: powerful, terrifying, box-office.

If that makes it sound like a tyrannosaur, then perhaps that is no coincidence. The Romans, much like the dinosaurs, are not merely glamorous—they are also safely extinct. Two thousand years have passed since the heyday of the pax Romana. The age when the capital was at its most teeming and gilded, when the sands of the Colosseum were black with the blood of gladiators, when the rule of Caesar was backed by legions capable of visiting slaughter and ruin on all who opposed them, are long gone. Few people watching Gladiator, no matter how much they might be rooting for Russell Crowe, feel complicit in the enthusiasm of the crowd. The Romans are too distant to be truly unsettling; instead, they have become exotic.

The display of might—especially when backed up by color, clamor, and overpowering architecture—can be stirring, even thrilling. Successful empires have always understood this. It helps to explain why so many capitals in Europe and America are replete with monuments inspired by imperial Rome. Yet the shadow these buildings cast in the 21st century is not merely a Roman one. We understand, as the designers of the Capitol and the Arc de Triomphe did not, to what extremes swagger and steel can lead. With fascism, a long tradition in Western politics reached a hideous climax and then expired.

But the fascination with power endures. Only the most toxic crank today would confess to finding the displays of Nazism alluring. Yet Julius Caesar—who was reported by one classical biographer to have slaughtered a million people and enslaved another million while conquering the region of Gaul—still has his statue in the centre of Rome, while, just down the road, touts dressed as centurions and gladiators encourage tourists to pose with them outside the Colosseum. The empire of the Caesars—unlike more recent empires—is removed in time enough from us to be protected by a certain statute of limitations.

Of course, this does not explain why modern-day men of America are busy thinking about the Romans rather than, say, the Egyptians, or the Assyrians, or the Vikings. The answer, perhaps, lies in the way that the Romans, more than any other ancient people, seem to offer America a distorted reflection of itself. So they have always done. Just as American conservatives today look back wistfully to the Founding Fathers as patrons of an age of rugged independence and virtue, so did the Founding Fathers look back with an equal wistfulness to the early years of Rome. There, for any infant republic victorious in a war against a great monarchy, was a morality tale to be found that could hardly help but serve as inspiration. The Romans, like the Americans, had originally been ruled by a king; then, resolved no longer to live in servitude, they had dared all in a heroic and ultimately successful campaign to expel him. In 1832, commissioned to mark the centennial of George Washington’s birth with a fittingly imposing statue, the sculptor Horatio Greenough represented him as a properly Roman hero, returning his sword to a grateful people. Simultaneously toga-clad and be-wigged, the first president of the United States was portrayed by Greenough as the heroic, if sartorially challenged, intersection point of twin republics: the Roman and the American.

In the 21st century, the parallels drawn between ancient Rome and the modern United States tend to be gloomier. Wars in Iraq; the rise in the east of a rival superpower; political vendettas pursued in the law courts; anxieties that venerable constitutional traditions are menaced by populism; the emergence of radicals preaching that the last will be first, and the first will be last, to the excitement of many, and the consternation of others. All these are developments that will be familiar to anyone with even the most glancing familiarity with Roman history.

Gladiator—the most celebrated sword-and-sandals epic of the 21st century (of which there is a sequel currently in the works)—offered a portrait of a world that seemed, in many ways, as much about the future as the past. Citizens fed on dazzling entertainments; armies striking at an elusive foreign foe; the high-tech delivery of weapons of fire. Here was a mirror being held up to the decades that were to come.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that so many Americans today should be thinking about the Roman Empire. They are thinking about a civilization that is at once strange and familiar; terrifying and glamorous; safely extinct and the image of themselves.

 

译者注：

“the last will be first, and the first will be last”

出自Matthew 20:16-28：So the last will be first, and the first last.

《马太福音》20:16-28：因此，为首的将要殿后，殿后的将要为首。

 

sword-and-sandals

剑与凉鞋：一种以古罗马、古希腊或古埃及等古代文明为背景的电影、电视剧或小说类型，通常包含英雄、战争、神话和冒险等元素。

 

这篇文章是针对最近在Tik Tok上比较火的一个meme写的，简要讲就是女性问家里的男性“How often do you think about Roman Empire?”感觉本篇文章的作者有些上纲上线，毕竟在Tik Tok发视频整活的人应该不会考虑那么多。感兴趣的同学可以看一下下面这篇文章，讲的还是比较详细的。

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2023/09/21/tiktoks-roman-empire-meme-explained/?sh=2627dbe9765b

 

原网址:

https://time.com/6316386/tom-holland-roman-empire-obsession-essay