帝国边缘的“野蛮人”:奥维德流放诗歌中的“文化殖民问题”

“Barbarians” on the Margins of the Roman Empire:“Cultural Colonization” in Ovid’s Exilic Poetry

学者哈比奈克认为流放黑海地区的奥维德是罗马边疆一位自觉的文化殖民者,此观点不合事实。罗马从未把征服或弹压异族的战争视为先进文化改造野蛮文化的行为,奧维德本人更不具备参与“文化殖民”的动机。他呈现的不是自己如何成功保持了“罗马性”,而是“罗马性”受到了严重的威胁。虽然其作品中存在罗马中心主义情绪,蛮族形象也常偏于负面,但他并无维吉尔那种罗马民族应当征服万族的天命观,也无贺拉斯那样浓烈的帝国意识。他的流放诗歌挑战了罗马人心目中的帝国形象,增进了他们对多瑙河流域和黑海沿岸民族的了解。边疆生活给了奥维德深入反思西方古典时代“野蛮人”观念的机会,让他意识到以语言为基础的文明野蛮之分是武断而缺乏逻辑的。

Habinek labels Ovid exiled to Pontus as a self-conscious acculturator in the Roman frontiers,but this view is not well founded.Rome never interpreted its wars against foreign nations as attempts to replace barbarian cultures with its own civilized version,nor was Ovid motivated for any form of cultural colonization.Instead of showing himself maintaining his Romanness successfully,his exilic corpus dramatizes how it was under siege.Though imbued with ethnocentrism and depicting the local tribes negatively,Ovid did not subscribe to the Virgilian concept of Rome's destiny as a conqueror or Horatian imperialism.Rather,his poems challenged the contemporary understanding of the Empire and improved the Romans' knowledge of the peoples along the Danube and the Euxine coast.The frontier life enabled Ovid to radically reappraise the notion of barbarus,alerting him to the arbitrary and illogical nature of the language-based division between the civilized and the barbarian.