Diogenes_ad_Alexander__戴奥吉尼斯和亚历山大.doc

Diogenes and Alexander 戴奥吉尼斯和亚历山大The Dog Has His DayGilbert 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 squatters 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 cha