Every classic conveys a sense of its own inevitability —— but perhaps none more so than the Aeneid. Virgil’s great poem is, after all, the epic of the West and has shaped no only our understanding of Rome, but also of what a hero is, what an epic poem ought to be, and how poetry should be read. And yet such a classicizing view, bred of long familiarity and adaptive reuse, misrepresents the true greatness of the poem, most especially its novel, almost experimental, poetics and the highly contingent nature[1] of its political and philosophical content.
每部经典都会遇到它所谓的必然性——但是可能没有哪一部比得上埃涅阿斯纪。毕竟，维吉尔的这部伟大诗歌是西方史诗的经典，它不仅仅构造了我们对于罗马的认识，也构造了我们对于一个英雄、对于一首英雄史诗，甚至是对于如何阅读一部诗歌的认识。但是这样一种由于长期的反复引用和长时间的熟悉导致的经典看法，其实会让我们对这部伟大著作产生误解，尤其是会让我们误解它那新颖的、甚至可以说是实验性的诗歌写作方法，也会让我们误解它与它内含的政治和哲学内容高度相关的本质。
标注：contingent nature: the nature of depending on something else
To appreciate the Aeneid, both as a work of art and as a component in our Western cultural formation, we must have some familiarity with the complicated historical background that self-consciously underlies the text (section I below). We also need to know something about its literary background, in particular the tradition of Homeric epic, which Virgil appropriated, distorted, and forever transformed (section II). Then, we need to appreciate the subtleties of Virgilian poetics, the symbolic way in which Roman history is grafted on to[2] Greek myth (section III), and the way in which the clear moral structure of the poem is in tension with the sympathies it evokes in us (section IV). Finally, the way in which the Aeneid resists closure demands that we approach it with an openness to its multiple and changing meanings, which have enabled the poem to transcend its particular historical moment and to speak at a level more philosophical than political to people of all times and places (seciton V).
埃涅阿斯纪既是一部艺术作品，也是我们西方文化形成的元素之一。为了更好欣赏它，我们有必要熟悉一下那些已经完全融入到文章内部的复杂的历史背景。我们也有必要了解一下这个诗歌的文学背景，尤其是维吉尔拿来使用的、扭曲了的、被永远改变了的古希腊史诗传统内容。然后，我们要去了解维吉尔式诗歌的精致性，去了解罗马历史与希腊神话密不可分的象征主义手法，去了解这部史诗中清晰的道德构建与唤起我们情感的同情心之间的紧密关系，最后还要去了解这部史诗最终没有结局的特征是如何让我们必须用一种开放的眼光去审视这部作品，而其中的多样性和涵义的改变，最终会让这部诗歌超越了它的特定历史背景，会让这部诗歌在所有的时间和地点背景之下都更加的富有哲学意义而不仅仅是政治意义。
标注：grafted on to: insert or fix (something) permanently to something else, typically in a way considered inappropriate
I. Historical Background: the Roman Civil Wars and the Augustan Settlement
历史背景：罗马内战和奥古斯都和平
When Virgil was born in Mantua in 70 BCE, Rome had boasted of a republican form of government for hundreds of years. The small city-state established in central Italy in 753 BCE (the traditional date for the city’s founding by Aeneas’ descendants, Romulus and Remus) had gradually subsumed[3] , largely through conquest, all of the Italian peninsula and many contiguous Mediterranean states, including those of Greece, Sicily, Carthage (in North Africa), and even some of Asia. Lately, however, the social and political fabric had begun to unravel[4] , as the class struggle, always an important factor in Roman politics, turned particularly violent. This tendency was abetted by structural weaknesses in the machinery[5] of government and also by the expansion of Rome’s empire by military conquest, which offered ambitious generalissimos[6] opportunities for ruthless self-promotion.
维吉尔出生之前的情况
标注：subsume: include A into B
… fabric had begun to unravel: something had begun
machinery: system
generalisimo: 三军统帅、大元帅(比如袁世凯或者Kim Jung Un)
Virgil had just turned twenty-one when this process culminated in a bloody civil war that put Julius Caesar into power. Although the traditional governing institutions were still nominally intact —— the senate, assembly, magistracies[7] , and courts —— much actual power resided in this one man who packed these institutions with his partisans[8] , retained control of the army, and had himself voted dictator for life. Amid rumors that he planned to take further constitutional liberties and make himself king, Brutus and Cassius led a conspiracy: on the Ides[9] of March 44 BCE Caesar was assassinated in the Senate.
维吉尔成年; 凯撒被刺杀
标注：magistracy: 地方执法法庭
pack some place with his partisans： 在。。。地方安插满了党羽
ides: 古罗马历的月中
The death of Caesar did not, however, bring about a return to the good old days, if such had ever existed. Instead, control of the state passed to a triumvirate[10] consisting of Marc Antony (Caesar’s former colleague in the consulship[11] ), Octavian (Caesar’s great-nephew, adopted son, and heir), and Lepidus (Caesar’s master of horses). In 42 BCE, the triumvirate defeated Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. But then, only a few years later, Antony and Octavian initiated another, and even bloodier, civil war agaisnt each other. This ended in 31 BCE at the battle of Actium, where Octavian defeated Antony and his ally, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and established himself as the sole ruler of Rome —— princeps, a word that literally meant only “first citizen” but which would eventually acquire the monarchical and dynastic connotations of our cognate word “prince”.
奥古斯都打败安东尼成为princeps
标注：triumvirate: 三巨头同盟
consulship: 领事任期
The birth of the principate[12] confirmed what had, in fact, been under way for a century, the death of the republic. But Octavian, who subsequently (in 27 BCE) took the name Augustus (“the august one”), did not want his actions to be understood in such terms. Just how he wanted to be viewed can be seen from his autobiography, the Res Gestae (“Deeds”), which is preserved on a monumental inscription found in Ankara, Turkey. Looking back to the earlier years in which he came to power, Augustus names neither Antony nor and other opposition figure (he speaks only of a “faction”); instead, he downplays the memory of the civil wars in which so many citizens had died, and when he deals with military matters he prefers to enumerate[13] less objectionable triumphs over foreign foes. Having learned from the mistakes of his adoptive father, Augustus asserts that he refused all extra-constitutional arrangements. He downplays the actual sources of his power —— his command over large standing armies; his access to the wealth of Egypt, which had become an imperial province after Cleopatra’s death; and his possession of the tribune’s[14] capacity to influence legislation. Instead, he attributes his preeminence in the state simply to his moral and personal authority (auctoritas), which all men acknowledge (consensus). His essential boast is not that he established a new form of government but, rather, that he restored the republic. Indeed much of this extradordinary document is concerned not with proclaiming change but affirming continuity. Thus, Augustus boasts of restoring the ancient temples that had fallen into disrepaire during the civil wars, of initiating religious and moral reformes to call the people back to their ancestral piety, and, finally, of bringing peace back to Italy and to most of the Roman world.
奥古斯都和平，自认为把罗马带回到了原来的共和国时期
标注： principate: 帝国君主政体
enumerate 细数
tribune: 古罗马时期由人民选出的保民官
Historians from antiquity onward have debated the extent to which this account is true or false. In all fairness, though, what the Augustan principate replaced was not a republic in our sense of the word, where all citizens have a share in representative government; rather, it was closer to an oligarchy, in which the major offices were usually controlled by a few important families. In addition, the old machinery of governemnt had become inadequate to the needs of a far-flung[15] empire and Augustus’ reorganization not only improved efficiency but also guaranteed stability and prosperity for centuries to come. Finally, there was at least some legitimacy to Augustus’ claim that he restored peace after the civil wars, although that boon[16] was achieved at great cost.
其实奥古斯都时期的民主只能被称为是寡头统治。这个和平来之不易，成本很高
标注： far-flung: 遥远
boon: 恩赐
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