Works of fiction also come under suspicion. We owe the complete version of The Satyricon, supposedly written under Nero, to a manuscxt discovered by Poggio Bracciolini in Cologne.[10] Apuleius’ novel The Golden Ass was also found by Poggio in the same manuscxt as the fragments of Tacitus’ Annales and Histories. It was unknown before the thirteenth century, and its central piece, the tale of Cupid and Psyche, seems derived from the more archaic version found in the twelfth-century Roman de Partonopeu de Blois.[11]
The question can be raised of why Romans would bother writing and copying such works on papyrus volumen, but the more important question is: Why would medi monks copy and preserve them on expensive parchments? This question applies to all pagan authors, for none of them reached the Renaissance in manuscxts allegedly older than the ninth century. “Did the monks, out of pure scientific interest, have a duty to preserve for posterity, for the greater glory of paganism, the masterpieces of antiquity?” asks Hochart.

小說作品也受到質(zhì)疑。《薩提利翁》的完整版本，據(jù)說是在尼祿統(tǒng)治時(shí)期寫成的，我們要?dú)w功于波焦·布拉喬利尼在科隆發(fā)現(xiàn)的一份手稿。[10]波喬還在塔西佗的《年歷與歷史》的片斷中發(fā)現(xiàn)了阿普列夫的小說《金驢》。它在13世紀(jì)之前是不為人知的，它的中心部分，丘比特和普賽克的故事，似乎來自于12世紀(jì)羅馬人de Partonopeu de Blois發(fā)現(xiàn)的更古老的版本。
人們可能會(huì)問為什么羅馬人要在莎草紙上抄寫和復(fù)制這些作品，但更重要的問題是:為什么中世紀(jì)的僧侶要在昂貴的羊皮紙上抄寫和保存這些作品?這個(gè)問題適用于所有異教作者，因?yàn)樗麄儧]有一份進(jìn)入文藝復(fù)興時(shí)期的手稿據(jù)說能比九世紀(jì)更早。“
僧侶們是否出于純粹的科學(xué)興趣，有義務(wù)為后代保存古代的杰作，為異教的更大榮耀而保存這些杰作?”Hochart問道。

And not only masterpieces, but bundles of letters! In the early years of the sixteenth century, the Veronian Fra Giovanni Giocondo discovered a volume of 121 letters exchanged between Pliny the Younger (friend of Tacitus) and Emperor Trajan around the year 112. This “book”, writes Latinist scholar Jacques Heurgon, “had disappeared during the whole Middle Ages, and one could believe it definitively lost, when it suddenly emerged, in the very first years of the sixteenth century, in a single manuscxt which, having been copied, partially, then completely, was lost again.”[12] Such unsuspecting presentation is illustrative of the blind confidence of classical scholars in their Latin sources, unknown in the Middle Ages and magically appearing from nowhere in the Renaissance.

不僅是杰作，還有成捆的信件！在16世紀(jì)早期，Veronian的Fra Giovanni Giocondo發(fā)現(xiàn)了一卷121封小普林尼(塔西佗的朋友)和圖拉真皇帝在公元112年左右交換的信件。拉丁學(xué)者雅克·厄貢(Jacques Heurgon)寫道，這本“書信”在整個(gè)中世紀(jì)都消失了，人們可以相信它肯定已經(jīng)遺失了，但在16世紀(jì)初，它突然以一份手稿的形式出現(xiàn)，經(jīng)過部分復(fù)制，然后完全復(fù)制，又遺失了。”這種“毫不令人懷疑”的表述說明了古典學(xué)者對(duì)他們的拉丁文獻(xiàn)的盲目自信，這些文獻(xiàn)在中世紀(jì)是不為人知的，在文藝復(fù)興時(shí)期卻神奇地憑空出現(xiàn)了。

The strangest thing, Hochart remarks, is that Christian monks are supposed to have copied thousands of pagan volumes on expensive parchment, only to treat them as worthless rubbish:
“To explain how many works of Latin authors had remained unknown to scholars of previous centuries and were uncovered by Renaissance scholars, it was said that monks had generally relegated to the attics or cellars of their convents most of the pagan writings that had been in their libraries. It was therefore among the discarded obxts, sometimes among the rubbish, when they were allowed to search there, that the finders of manuscxts found, they claimed, the masterpieces of antiquity.”

Hochart說，最奇怪的是，基督教僧侶應(yīng)該在昂貴的羊皮紙上抄寫了數(shù)千卷異教書籍，卻把它們當(dāng)作毫無價(jià)值的垃圾來對(duì)待：
“為了解釋有多少拉丁作家的作品是前幾個(gè)世紀(jì)的學(xué)者所不知道的，而被文藝復(fù)興時(shí)期的學(xué)者發(fā)現(xiàn)了，據(jù)說僧侶們通常把圖書館里的大部分異教著作都藏在修道院的閣樓或地窖里。因此，手稿的發(fā)現(xiàn)者在被丟棄的物品中，有時(shí)在垃圾中，當(dāng)他們被允許進(jìn)入查探時(shí)，他們聲稱發(fā)現(xiàn)了古代的杰作?！?/b>

In medi convents, manuscxt copying was a commercial craft, and focused exclusively on religious books such as psalters, gospels, missals, catechisms, and saints’ legends. They were mostly copied on papyrus. Parchment and vellum were reserved for luxury books, and since it was a very expensive material, it was common practice to scrape old scrolls in order to reuse them. Pagan works were the first to disappear. In fact, their destruction, rather than their preservation, was considered a holy deed, as hagiographers abundantly illustrate in their saints’ lives.

在中世紀(jì)的修道院里，抄寫手稿是一種商業(yè)活動(dòng)，而且專門抄寫宗教書籍，比如詩篇、福音書、彌撒書、教義問答和圣徒傳說。它們大多被抄寫在莎草紙上。羊皮紙和牛皮紙是專門用來制作豪華書籍的，由于這是一種非常昂貴的材料，為了重新使用它們，刮掉舊卷軸是一種常見的做法。異教徒的作品是最先消失的。事實(shí)上，它們的毀滅，而不是保存，被認(rèn)為是一種神圣的行為，正如圣徒傳記作者在他們圣徒的生活中大量說明的那樣。

How real is Julius Caesar?
Independently of Hochart, and on the basis of philological considerations, Robert Baldauf, professor at the university of Basle, argued that many of the most famous ancient Latin and Greek works are of late medi origin (Historie und Kritik, 1902). “Our Romans and Greeks have been Italian humanists,” he says. They have given us a whole fantasy world of Antiquity that “has rooted itself in our perception to such an extent that no positivist criticisms can make humanity doubt its veracity.”
Baldauf points out, for example, German and Italian influences in Horace’s Latin. On similar grounds, he concludes that Julius Cesar’s books, so appreciated for their exquisite Latin, are late medi forgeries. Recent historians of Gaul, now informed by archeology, are actually puzzled by Cesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico—our only source on the elusive Vercingetorix. Everything in there that doesn’t come from book XXIII of Poseidonios’ Histories appears either wrong or unreliable in terms of geography, demography, anthropology, and religion.

凱撒大帝有多真實(shí)?
巴塞爾大學(xué)教授羅伯特·巴爾道夫(Robert Baldauf)認(rèn)為，許多最著名的古代拉丁語和希臘語作品都起源于中世紀(jì)晚期，這與Hochart的觀點(diǎn)無關(guān)，而是基于語言學(xué)上的考慮?！拔覀兊牧_馬人和希臘人都是意大利的人文主義者，”他說。他們給了我們一個(gè)完整的古代幻想世界，這個(gè)世界“在我們的感知中根深蒂固，以至于任何實(shí)證主義的批評(píng)都無法使人類懷疑它的真實(shí)性?！?br /> 例如，巴爾道夫指出，賀拉斯的拉丁語受到了德國和意大利的影響?；谕瑯拥睦碛?，他得出結(jié)論，尤利烏斯·塞薩爾(Julius Cesar)的書，因其精致的拉丁語而備受贊賞，是中世紀(jì)晚期的偽造品。最近的高盧歷史學(xué)家，現(xiàn)在根據(jù)考古學(xué)的信息，實(shí)際上對(duì)凱撒的《貝洛·高盧注釋》感到困惑，這是我們關(guān)于難以捉摸的維辛蓋托里克斯的唯一來源。在地理，人口，人類學(xué)和宗教方面，所有不是來自《波塞冬尼奧斯的歷史》第23卷的內(nèi)容，要么是錯(cuò)誤的，要么是不可靠的。

A great mystery hangs over the supposed author himself. We are taught that “Caesar” was a cognomen (nickname) of unknown meaning and origin, and that it was adopted immediately after Julius Caesar’s death as imperial title; we are asked to believe, in other words, that the emperors all called themselves Caesar in memory of that general and dictator who was not even emperor, and that the term gained such prestige that it went on to be adopted by Russian “Czars” and German “Kaisers”. But that etymology has long been challenged by those (including Voltaire) who claim that Caesar comes from an Indo-European root word meaning “king”, which also gave the Persian Khosro. These two origins cannot both be true, and the second seems well grounded.

一個(gè)巨大的謎團(tuán)籠罩著所謂的作者本人。我們被教導(dǎo)說，“凱撒”是一個(gè)意義和來源不明的名(昵稱)，它是在朱利葉斯·凱撒死后立即被作為皇帝頭銜采用的；換句話說，我們被要求相信，所有的皇帝都稱自己為凱撒，是為了紀(jì)念那個(gè)甚至不是皇帝的將軍和獨(dú)裁者，這個(gè)稱呼獲得了如此高的威望，以至于后來被俄國的“沙皇”和德國的“皇帝”所采用。
但這個(gè)詞源學(xué)長(zhǎng)期以來一直受到一些人(包括伏爾泰)的質(zhì)疑，他們聲稱凱撒來自一個(gè)印歐詞根，意思是“國王”，這也給波斯語帶來了Khosro。這兩種起源不可能都是正確的，而第二種起源似乎是有根據(jù)的。

Cesar’s gentilice (surname) Iulius does not ease our perplexity. We are told by Virgil that it goes back to Cesar’s supposed ancestor Iulus or Iule. But Virgil also tells us (drawing from Cato the Elder, c. 168 BC) that it is the short name of Jupiter (Jul Pater). And it happens to be an Indo-European root word designating the sunlight or the day sky, identical to the Scandinavian name for the solar god, Yule (Helios for the Greeks, Haul for the Gauls, Hel for the Germans, from which derives the French No?l, Novo Hel). Is “Julius Caesar” the “Sun King”?

凱撒的非猶太姓尤里烏斯（Iulius）并沒有減輕我們的困惑。維吉爾告訴我們，它可以追溯到凱撒的祖先Iulus或Iule。但維吉爾也告訴我們(引自公元前168年的老卡托)，它是朱庇特(Jul Pater)的簡(jiǎn)稱。它恰好是一個(gè)印歐語系的詞根，指的是陽光或白天的天空，與斯堪的納維亞語中太陽神的名字Yule相同(希臘人叫Helios，高盧人叫Haul，日耳曼人叫Hel，法語的No?l, Novo Hel就是從這個(gè)詞衍生出來的)?！皠P撒大帝”是“太陽王”嗎?

Consider, in addition, that: 1. Roman emperors were traditionally declared adoptive sons of the sun-god Jupiter or of the “Undefeated Sun” (Sol Invictus). 2. The first emperor, Octavian Augustus, was allegedly the adoptive son of Julius Caesar, whom he divinized under the name Iulius Caesar Divus (celebrated on January 1), while renaming in his honor the first month of summer, July. If Augustus is both the adoptive son of the divine Sun and the adoptive son of the divine Julius, and if in addition Julius or Julus is the divine name of the Sun, it means that the divine Julius is none other than the divine Sun (and the so-called “Julian” calendar simply meant the “solar” calendar). Julius Caesar has been brought down from heaven to earth, transposed from mythology to history. That is a common process in Roman history, according to Georges Dumézil, who explains the notorious poverty of Roman mythology by the fact that it “was radically destroyed at the level of theology [but] flourished in the form of history,” which is to say that Roman history is a literary fiction built on mythical structures

此外，考慮到:
1. 羅馬皇帝傳統(tǒng)上被宣布為太陽神朱庇特或“不敗的太陽”(Sol Invictus)的養(yǎng)子。
2. 第一位皇帝，屋大維·奧古斯都，據(jù)說是尤利烏斯·凱撒的養(yǎng)子，他把尤利烏斯·凱撒拔高為“尤利烏斯·凱撒神”(在1月1日慶祝)，同時(shí)為了紀(jì)念他，將夏天的第一個(gè)月重新命名為“七月”（July）。
如果奧古斯都是神圣的太陽和神圣的朱利葉斯（Julius）的養(yǎng)子，另外，如果朱利葉斯是太陽的神圣名字，這意味著神圣的朱利葉斯不是別人，正是神圣的太陽(所謂的“儒略歷”只是指“太陽歷”)。凱撒大帝被從天堂帶到人間，從神話變成了歷史。
這是羅馬歷史上的一個(gè)普遍過程，喬治·杜姆薩齊爾認(rèn)為，他解釋了羅馬神話臭名昭著的貧窮，因?yàn)樗霸谏駥W(xué)層面上被徹底摧毀，但在歷史形式上卻蓬勃發(fā)展”，也就是說，羅馬歷史是建立在神話結(jié)構(gòu)上的文學(xué)小說。

The mystery surrounding Julius Caesar is of course of great consequence, since on him rests the historiography of Imperial Rome. If Julius Caesar is a fiction, then so is much of Imperial Rome. Note that, on the coins attributed to his era, the first emperor is simply named Augustus Caesar, which is not a name, but a title that could be applied to any emperor.

圍繞尤里烏斯·凱撒的謎團(tuán)當(dāng)然是非常重要的，因?yàn)樗橇_馬帝國史學(xué)的基礎(chǔ)。如果尤利烏斯·凱撒是虛構(gòu)的，那么羅馬帝國的大部分歷史也是虛構(gòu)的。請(qǐng)注意，在他那個(gè)時(shí)代的硬幣上，第一位皇帝只是簡(jiǎn)單地命名為奧古斯都·凱撒，這不是一個(gè)名字，而是一個(gè)可以適用于任何皇帝的頭銜。


At this point, most readers will have lost patience. With those whose curiosity surpasses their skepticism, we shall now argue that Imperial Rome is actually, for a large part, a fictitious mirror image of Constantinople, a fantasy that started emerging in the eleventh century in the context of the cultural war waged by the papacy against the Byzantine empire, and solidified in the fifteenth century, in the context of the plunder of Byzantine culture that is known as the Renaissance. This, of course, will raise many obxtions, some of which will be addressed here, others in further articles.
First obxtion: Wasn’t Constantinople founded by a Roman emperor, namely Constantine the Great? So it is said. But then, how real is this legendary Constantine?

說到這里，大多數(shù)讀者都會(huì)失去耐心。對(duì)于那些好奇心超過懷疑的人來說，我們現(xiàn)在要論證的是，羅馬帝國實(shí)際上，在很大程度上，是君士坦丁堡的一個(gè)虛構(gòu)的鏡像，這個(gè)幻想在11世紀(jì)教皇對(duì)拜占庭帝國發(fā)動(dòng)的文化戰(zhàn)爭(zhēng)中開始出現(xiàn)，并在15世紀(jì)，在文藝復(fù)興時(shí)期對(duì)拜占庭文化的掠奪中得到鞏固。當(dāng)然，這將引起許多反對(duì)意見，其中一些將在這里討論，其他的將在以后的文章中討論。
第一個(gè)反對(duì)意見：君士坦丁堡不是由羅馬皇帝，即君士坦丁大帝建立的嗎?
據(jù)說是這樣。那么，這個(gè)傳說中的君士坦丁到底有多真實(shí)呢?

How real is Constantine the Great?
If Julius Caesar is the alpha of the Western Roman Empire, Constantine is the omega. One major difference between them is the nature of our sources. For Constantine’s biography, we are totally dependent on Christian authors, beginning with Eusebius of Caesarea, whose Life of Constantine, including the story of the emperor’s conversion to Christianity, is a mixture of eulogy and hagiography.
The common notion derived from Eusebius is that Constantine moved the capital of his Empire from Rome to Byzantium, which he renamed in his own honor. But that general narrative of the first translatio imperii is itself replete with inner contradictions. First, Constantine didn’t really move his capital to the East, because he was himself from the East. He was born in Naissus (today Nis in Serbia), in the region then called Moesia, West of Thracia. According to standard history, Constantine had never set foot in Rome before he marched on the city and conquered it from Maxentius.

君士坦丁大帝有多真實(shí)?
如果說凱撒大帝是西羅馬帝國的首領(lǐng)，那么君士坦丁就是歐米茄。它們之間的一個(gè)主要區(qū)別是來源的性質(zhì)。對(duì)于君士坦丁的傳記，我們完全依賴于基督教作者，從凱撒利亞的尤西比烏開始，他的《君士坦丁傳》，包括皇帝皈依基督教的故事，是頌詞和圣徒傳記的混合體。
尤西比烏斯的普遍觀點(diǎn)是，君士坦丁將帝國的首都從羅馬遷至拜占庭，并以自己的名義重新命名。但是首次“權(quán)力的轉(zhuǎn)移”（translatio imperii）的普遍敘述本身就充滿了內(nèi)在的矛盾。
首先，君士坦丁并沒有把首都遷往東方，因?yàn)樗约壕褪莵碜詵|方。他出生在Naissus(今天塞爾維亞的Nis)，在色雷斯西部的一個(gè)地區(qū)，當(dāng)時(shí)被稱為Moesia。根據(jù)標(biāo)準(zhǔn)的歷史記載，君士坦丁在進(jìn)軍羅馬并從馬克森提烏斯手中征服這座城市之前從未踏足羅馬。
原創(chuàng)翻譯：龍騰網(wǎng) http://www.top-shui.cn 轉(zhuǎn)載請(qǐng)注明出處


Constantine wasn’t just a Roman who happened to be born in Moesia. His father Constantius also came from Moesia. And so did his predecessor Diocletian, who was born in Moesia, built his palace there (Split, today in Croatia), and died there. In Byzantine chronicles, Diocletian is given as Dux Moesiae (Wikipedia), which can mean “king of Moesia”, for well into the Early Middle Ages, dux was more or less synonymous with rex.[15]
Textbook history tells us that, on becoming emperor, Diocletian decided to share his power with Maximian as co-emperor. That is already odd enough. But instead of keeping for himself the historical heart of the empire, he left it to his subordinate and settled in the East. Seven years later, he divided the Empire further into a tetrarchy; instead of one Augustus Caesar, there was now two Augustus and two Caesars. Diocletian retired to the far eastern part of Asia Minor, bordering on Persia. Like Constantine after him, Diocletian never reigned in Rome; he visited it once in his lifetime.

君士坦丁不只是一個(gè)碰巧出生在摩西亞的羅馬人。他父親君士坦丟也是摩西亞人。他的前任戴克里先(Diocletian)也是如此。戴克里先出生在Moesia，在那里建造了宮殿(Split，今天在克羅地亞境內(nèi))，并在那里去世。在拜占庭編年史中，戴克里先被稱為Dux Moesiae(維基百科)，意思是“Moesia的國王”，因?yàn)樵谥惺兰o(jì)早期，Dux或多或少是rex的同義詞。
教科書上的歷史告訴我們，戴克里先在成為皇帝后，決定與馬克西米利安共同執(zhí)政。這已經(jīng)夠奇怪了。更奇怪 是，他并沒有把帝國的歷史中心留給自己，而是把它留給了他的下屬，在東方定居下來。七年后，他將帝國進(jìn)一步劃分為四帝共治；不是一個(gè)奧古斯都·凱撒，而是兩個(gè)奧古斯都和兩個(gè)凱撒。戴克里先退隱到與波斯接壤的小亞細(xì)亞的遠(yuǎn)東地區(qū)。像他之后的君士坦丁一樣，戴克里先從未統(tǒng)治過羅馬;他一生中只參觀過一次。

This leads us to the second inner contradiction of the translatio imperii paradigm: Constantine didn’t really move the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium, because Rome had ceased to be the imperial capital in 286, being replaced by Milan. By the time of Diocletian and Constantine, the whole of Italy had actually fallen into anarchy during the Crisis of the Third Century (AD 235–284). When in 402 AD, the Eastern emperor Honorius restored order in the Peninsula, he transferred its capital to Ravenna on the Adriatic coast. So from 286 on, we are supposed to have a Roman Empire with a deserted Rome.

這就引出了帝國“權(quán)力轉(zhuǎn)移”的第二個(gè)內(nèi)在矛盾：君士坦丁并沒有真正將帝國首都從羅馬遷往拜占庭，因?yàn)榱_馬在286年就不再是帝國首都了，取而代之的是米蘭。在戴克里先和君士坦丁統(tǒng)治時(shí)期，整個(gè)意大利在三世紀(jì)危機(jī)時(shí)期(公元235-284年)陷入無政府狀態(tài)。
公元402年，東羅馬皇帝霍諾里烏斯恢復(fù)了半島的秩序，將首都遷至亞得里亞海沿岸的拉文納。所以從286年開始，這里應(yīng)該算是一個(gè)被遺棄的羅馬帝國。

The conundrum only thickens when we compare Roman and Byzantine cultures. According to the translatio imperii paradigm, the Eastern Roman Empire is the continuation of the Western Roman Empire. But Byzantium scholars insist on the great differences between the Greek-speaking Byzantine civilization and the earlier civilization of the Latium. Byzantinist Anthony Kaldellis wrote:
“The Byzantines were not a warlike people. […] They preferred to pay their enemies either to go away or to fight among themselves. Likewise, the court at the heart of their empire sought to buy allegiance with honors, fancy titles, bales of silk, and streams of gold. Politics was the cunning art of providing just the right incentives to win over supporters and keep them loyal. Money, silk, and titles were the empire’s preferred instruments of governance and foreign policy, over swords and armies.”

當(dāng)我們比較羅馬文化和拜占庭文化時(shí)，這個(gè)難題就變得更加復(fù)雜了。根據(jù)帝國“權(quán)力的轉(zhuǎn)移”（translatio imperii），東羅馬帝國是西羅馬帝國的延續(xù)。但拜占庭學(xué)者堅(jiān)持認(rèn)為，講希臘語的拜占庭文明與早期的拉丁文明之間存在巨大差異。拜占庭主義者Anthony Kaldellis寫道:
“拜占庭人不是好戰(zhàn)的民族。他們寧愿付錢給敵人，要么讓他們走開，要么讓他們自相殘殺。同樣，帝國的核心朝廷試圖用榮譽(yù)、花哨的頭銜、成捆的絲綢和源源不斷的黃金來收買臣民。政治是一門狡猾的藝術(shù)，提供恰到好處的激勵(lì)來贏得支持者并保持他們的忠誠。金錢、絲綢和頭銜而非刀劍和軍隊(duì)是帝國統(tǒng)治和外交政策的首選工具?！?/b>

The Byzantine civilization owed nothing to Rome. It inherited all its philosophical, scientific, poetic, mythological, and artistic tradition from classical Greece. Culturally, it was closer to Persia and Egypt than to Italy, which it treated as a colony. At the dawn of the second millenium AD, it had almost no recollection of its supposed Latin past, to the point that the most famous byzantine philosopher of the eleventh century, Michael Psellos, confused Cicero with Caesar.

拜占庭文明不欠羅馬任何東西。它從古希臘繼承了所有的哲學(xué)、科學(xué)、詩歌、神話和藝術(shù)傳統(tǒng)。在文化上，它更接近波斯和埃及，而不是意大利，它把意大利當(dāng)作殖民地。在公元第二個(gè)千年之初，它幾乎沒有任何關(guān)于它所謂的拉丁歷史的記憶，以至于11世紀(jì)最著名的拜占庭哲學(xué)家邁克爾·普塞洛斯(Michael Psellos)把西塞羅(Cicero)和凱撒(Caesar)混淆了。

How does the textbook story of Constantine’s translatio imperii fit in this perspective? It doesn’t. In fact, the notion is highly problematic. Unwilling, for good reasons, to accept at face value the Christian tale that Constantine settled in Byzantium in order to leave Rome to the Pope, historians struggle to find a reasonable explanation for the transfer, and they generally settle for this one: after the old capital had fallen into irreversible decadence (soon to be sacked by the Gauls), Constantine decided to move the heart of the Empire closer to its most endangered borders. Does that make any sense? Even if it did, how plausible is the transfer of an imperial capital over a thousand miles, with senators, bureaucrats and armies, resulting in the metamorphosis of a Roman empire into another Roman empire with a totally different political structure, language, culture, and religion?

教科書上君士坦丁的“權(quán)力轉(zhuǎn)移”如何符合這個(gè)觀點(diǎn)?它不符合。事實(shí)上，這個(gè)概念是非常有問題的。出于充分的理由，君士坦丁不愿意接受基督教傳說中君士坦丁為了把羅馬留給教皇而在拜占庭定居的說法，歷史學(xué)家們努力尋找一個(gè)合理的解釋來說明這一轉(zhuǎn)移，他們通常認(rèn)為:在舊首都陷入不可挽回的頹廢(很快就被高盧人洗劫了)之后，君士坦丁決定把帝國的中心搬到離最危險(xiǎn)的邊界更近的地方。這說得通嗎?即使是這樣，一個(gè)帝國的首都在一千英里之外的地方轉(zhuǎn)移，有參議員，官僚和軍隊(duì)，導(dǎo)致一個(gè)羅馬帝國變成另一個(gè)羅馬帝國，擁有完全不同的政治結(jié)構(gòu)，語言，文化和宗教，這有多可信?
原創(chuàng)翻譯：龍騰網(wǎng) http://www.top-shui.cn 轉(zhuǎn)載請(qǐng)注明出處


One of the major sources of this preposterous concept is the false Donation of Constantine. While it is admitted that this document was forged by medi popes in order to justify their claim on Rome, its basic premise, the translation of the imperial capital to the East, has not been questioned. We suggest that Constantine’s translatio imperii was actually a mythological cover for the very real opposite movement of translatio studii, the transfer of Byzantine culture to the West that started before the crusades and evolved into systematic plunder after. Late medi Roman culture rationalized and disguised its less than honorable Byzantine origin by the opposite myth of the Roman origin of Constantinople.

這個(gè)荒謬概念的主要來源之一是君士坦丁的虛假捐贈(zèng)。雖然人們承認(rèn)這份文件是中世紀(jì)教皇偽造的，目的是為了證明他們對(duì)羅馬的主張是正確的，但它的基本前提——權(quán)力轉(zhuǎn)移的敘述——沒有受到質(zhì)疑。我們認(rèn)為君士坦丁的權(quán)力轉(zhuǎn)移實(shí)際上是一個(gè)神話的幌子，掩蓋了真正相反的轉(zhuǎn)移運(yùn)動(dòng)，即拜占庭文化向西方的轉(zhuǎn)移，始于十字軍東征之前，之后演變?yōu)橄到y(tǒng)的掠奪。中世紀(jì)晚期的羅馬文化通過相反的君士坦丁堡羅馬起源的神話來合理化和掩飾其不那么光榮的拜占庭起源。

This will become clearer in the next article, but here is already one example of an insurmountable contradiction to the accepted filiation between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire. One of the most fundamental and precious legacy of the Romans to our Western civilization is their tradition of civil law. Roman law is still the foundation of our legal system. How come, then, that Roman law was imported to Italy from Byzantium at the end of the eleventh century? Specialists like Harold Berman or Aldo Schiavone are adamant that knowledge of Roman laws had totally disappeared for 700 years in Western Europe, until a Byzantine copy of their compilation by Justinian (the Digesta) was discovered around 1080 by Bolognese scholars. This “700-year long eclipse” of Roman law in the West, is an undisputed yet almost incomprehensible phenomenon .[17]

關(guān)于這一點(diǎn)，將在下一篇文章中變得更加清晰，但這里已經(jīng)有一個(gè)例子，證明了東羅馬帝國和西羅馬帝國之間公認(rèn)的從屬關(guān)系是不可克服的矛盾。羅馬人給西方文明留下的最基本、最寶貴的遺產(chǎn)之一就是他們的民法傳統(tǒng)。羅馬法至今仍是我們法律制度的基礎(chǔ)。
那么，羅馬法是如何在11世紀(jì)末從拜占庭傳入意大利的呢?像哈羅德·伯曼(Harold Berman)或阿爾多·斯齊亞沃尼(Aldo Schiavone)這樣的專家堅(jiān)持認(rèn)為，羅馬法的知識(shí)在西歐已經(jīng)完全消失了700年，直到1080年左右，博洛尼亞學(xué)者發(fā)現(xiàn)了查士丁尼(Justinian)編纂的拜占庭版本(《羅馬法典匯編》)。在西方，羅馬法“長(zhǎng)達(dá)700年的衰落”是一個(gè)無可爭(zhēng)議但幾乎不可理解的現(xiàn)象。
（未完待續(xù)）