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.

小说作品也受到质疑。《萨提利翁》的完整版本，据说是在尼禄统治时期写成的，我们要归功于波焦·布拉乔利尼在科隆发现的一份手稿。[10]波乔还在塔西佗的《年历与历史》的片断中发现了阿普列夫的小说《金驴》。它在13世纪之前是不为人知的，它的中心部分，丘比特和普赛克的故事，似乎来自于12世纪罗马人de Partonopeu de Blois发现的更古老的版本。
人们可能会问为什么罗马人要在莎草纸上抄写和复制这些作品，但更重要的问题是:为什么中世纪的僧侣要在昂贵的羊皮纸上抄写和保存这些作品?这个问题适用于所有异教作者，因为他们没有一份进入文艺复兴时期的手稿据说能比九世纪更早。“
僧侣们是否出于纯粹的科学兴趣，有义务为后代保存古代的杰作，为异教的更大荣耀而保存这些杰作?”Hochart问道。

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.

不仅是杰作，还有成捆的信件！在16世纪早期，Veronian的Fra Giovanni Giocondo发现了一卷121封小普林尼(塔西佗的朋友)和图拉真皇帝在公元112年左右交换的信件。拉丁学者雅克·厄贡(Jacques Heurgon)写道，这本“书信”在整个中世纪都消失了，人们可以相信它肯定已经遗失了，但在16世纪初，它突然以一份手稿的形式出现，经过部分复制，然后完全复制，又遗失了。”这种“毫不令人怀疑”的表述说明了古典学者对他们的拉丁文献的盲目自信，这些文献在中世纪是不为人知的，在文艺复兴时期却神奇地凭空出现了。

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说，最奇怪的是，基督教僧侣应该在昂贵的羊皮纸上抄写了数千卷异教书籍，却把它们当作毫无价值的垃圾来对待：
“为了解释有多少拉丁作家的作品是前几个世纪的学者所不知道的，而被文艺复兴时期的学者发现了，据说僧侣们通常把图书馆里的大部分异教著作都藏在修道院的阁楼或地窖里。因此，手稿的发现者在被丢弃的物品中，有时在垃圾中，当他们被允许进入查探时，他们声称发现了古代的杰作。”

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.

在中世纪的修道院里，抄写手稿是一种商业活动，而且专门抄写宗教书籍，比如诗篇、福音书、弥撒书、教义问答和圣徒传说。它们大多被抄写在莎草纸上。羊皮纸和牛皮纸是专门用来制作豪华书籍的，由于这是一种非常昂贵的材料，为了重新使用它们，刮掉旧卷轴是一种常见的做法。异教徒的作品是最先消失的。事实上，它们的毁灭，而不是保存，被认为是一种神圣的行为，正如圣徒传记作者在他们圣徒的生活中大量说明的那样。

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.

凯撒大帝有多真实?
巴塞尔大学教授罗伯特·巴尔道夫(Robert Baldauf)认为，许多最著名的古代拉丁语和希腊语作品都起源于中世纪晚期，这与Hochart的观点无关，而是基于语言学上的考虑。“我们的罗马人和希腊人都是意大利的人文主义者，”他说。他们给了我们一个完整的古代幻想世界，这个世界“在我们的感知中根深蒂固，以至于任何实证主义的批评都无法使人类怀疑它的真实性。”
例如，巴尔道夫指出，贺拉斯的拉丁语受到了德国和意大利的影响。基于同样的理由，他得出结论，尤利乌斯·塞萨尔(Julius Cesar)的书，因其精致的拉丁语而备受赞赏，是中世纪晚期的伪造品。最近的高卢历史学家，现在根据考古学的信息，实际上对凯撒的《贝洛·高卢注释》感到困惑，这是我们关于难以捉摸的维辛盖托里克斯的唯一来源。在地理，人口，人类学和宗教方面，所有不是来自《波塞冬尼奥斯的历史》第23卷的内容，要么是错误的，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.

一个巨大的谜团笼罩着所谓的作者本人。我们被教导说，“凯撒”是一个意义和来源不明的名(昵称)，它是在朱利叶斯·凯撒死后立即被作为皇帝头衔采用的；换句话说，我们被要求相信，所有的皇帝都称自己为凯撒，是为了纪念那个甚至不是皇帝的将军和独裁者，这个称呼获得了如此高的威望，以至于后来被俄国的“沙皇”和德国的“皇帝”所采用。
但这个词源学长期以来一直受到一些人(包括伏尔泰)的质疑，他们声称凯撒来自一个印欧词根，意思是“国王”，这也给波斯语带来了Khosro。这两种起源不可能都是正确的，而第二种起源似乎是有根据的。

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 Noël, Novo Hel). Is “Julius Caesar” the “Sun King”?

凯撒的非犹太姓尤里乌斯（Iulius）并没有减轻我们的困惑。维吉尔告诉我们，它可以追溯到凯撒的祖先Iulus或Iule。但维吉尔也告诉我们(引自公元前168年的老卡托)，它是朱庇特(Jul Pater)的简称。它恰好是一个印欧语系的词根，指的是阳光或白天的天空，与斯堪的纳维亚语中太阳神的名字Yule相同(希腊人叫Helios，高卢人叫Haul，日耳曼人叫Hel，法语的Noël, Novo Hel就是从这个词衍生出来的)。“凯撒大帝”是“太阳王”吗?

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，考虑到:
1. 罗马皇帝传统上被宣布为太阳神朱庇特或“不败的太阳”(Sol Invictus)的养子。
2. 第一位皇帝，屋大维·奥古斯都，据说是尤利乌斯·凯撒的养子，他把尤利乌斯·凯撒拔高为“尤利乌斯·凯撒神”(在1月1日庆祝)，同时为了纪念他，将夏天的第一个月重新命名为“七月”（July）。
如果奥古斯都是神圣的太阳和神圣的朱利叶斯（Julius）的养子，另外，如果朱利叶斯是太阳的神圣名字，这意味着神圣的朱利叶斯不是别人，正是神圣的太阳(所谓的“儒略历”只是指“太阳历”)。凯撒大帝被从天堂带到人间，从神话变成了历史。
这是罗马历史上的一个普遍过程，乔治·杜姆萨齐尔认为，他解释了罗马神话臭名昭著的贫穷，因为它“在神学层面上被彻底摧毁，但在历史形式上却蓬勃发展”，也就是说，罗马历史是建立在神话结构上的文学小说。

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.

围绕尤里乌斯·凯撒的谜团当然是非常重要的，因为他是罗马帝国史学的基础。如果尤利乌斯·凯撒是虚构的，那么罗马帝国的大部分历史也是虚构的。请注意，在他那个时代的硬币上，第一位皇帝只是简单地命名为奥古斯都·凯撒，这不是一个名字，而是一个可以适用于任何皇帝的头衔。


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?

说到这里，大多数读者都会失去耐心。对于那些好奇心超过怀疑的人来说，我们现在要论证的是，罗马帝国实际上，在很大程度上，是君士坦丁堡的一个虚构的镜像，这个幻想在11世纪教皇对拜占庭帝国发动的文化战争中开始出现，并在15世纪，在文艺复兴时期对拜占庭文化的掠夺中得到巩固。当然，这将引起许多反对意见，其中一些将在这里讨论，其他的将在以后的文章中讨论。
第一个反对意见：君士坦丁堡不是由罗马皇帝，即君士坦丁大帝建立的吗?
据说是这样。那么，这个传说中的君士坦丁到底有多真实呢?

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实?
如果说凯撒大帝是西罗马帝国的首领，那么君士坦丁就是欧米茄。它们之间的一个主要区别是来源的性质。对于君士坦丁的传记，我们完全依赖于基督教作者，从凯撒利亚的尤西比乌开始，他的《君士坦丁传》，包括皇帝皈依基督教的故事，是颂词和圣徒传记的混合体。
尤西比乌斯的普遍观点是，君士坦丁将帝国的首都从罗马迁至拜占庭，并以自己的名义重新命名。但是首次“权力的转移”（translatio imperii）的普遍叙述本身就充满了内在的矛盾。
首先，君士坦丁并没有把首都迁往东方，因为他自己就是来自东方。他出生在Naissus(今天塞尔维亚的Nis)，在色雷斯西部的一个地区，当时被称为Moesia。根据标准的历史记载，君士坦丁在进军罗马并从马克森提乌斯手中征服这座城市之前从未踏足罗马。

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.

君士坦丁不只是一个碰巧出生在摩西亚的罗马人。他父亲君士坦丢也是摩西亚人。他的前任戴克里先(Diocletian)也是如此。戴克里先出生在Moesia，在那里建造了宫殿(Split，今天在克罗地亚境内)，并在那里去世。在拜占庭编年史中，戴克里先被称为Dux Moesiae(维基百科)，意思是“Moesia的国王”，因为在中世纪早期，Dux或多或少是rex的同义词。
教科书上的历史告诉我们，戴克里先在成为皇帝后，决定与马克西米利安共同执政。这已经够奇怪了。更奇怪 是，他并没有把帝国的历史中心留给自己，而是把它留给了他的下属，在东方定居下来。七年后，他将帝国进一步划分为四帝共治；不是一个奥古斯都·凯撒，而是两个奥古斯都和两个凯撒。戴克里先退隐到与波斯接壤的小亚细亚的远东地区。像他之后的君士坦丁一样，戴克里先从未统治过罗马;他一生中只参观过一次。

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.

这就引出了帝国“权力转移”的第二个内在矛盾：君士坦丁并没有真正将帝国首都从罗马迁往拜占庭，因为罗马在286年就不再是帝国首都了，取而代之的是米兰。在戴克里先和君士坦丁统治时期，整个意大利在三世纪危机时期(公元235-284年)陷入无政府状态。
公元402年，东罗马皇帝霍诺里乌斯恢复了半岛的秩序，将首都迁至亚得里亚海沿岸的拉文纳。所以从286年开始，这里应该算是一个被遗弃的罗马帝国。

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.”

当我们比较罗马文化和拜占庭文化时，这个难题就变得更加复杂了。根据帝国“权力的转移”（translatio imperii），东罗马帝国是西罗马帝国的延续。但拜占庭学者坚持认为，讲希腊语的拜占庭文明与早期的拉丁文明之间存在巨大差异。拜占庭主义者Anthony Kaldellis写道:
“拜占庭人不是好战的民族。他们宁愿付钱给敌人，要么让他们走开，要么让他们自相残杀。同样，帝国的核心朝廷试图用荣誉、花哨的头衔、成捆的丝绸和源源不断的黄金来收买臣民。政治是一门狡猾的艺术，提供恰到好处的激励来赢得支持者并保持他们的忠诚。金钱、丝绸和头衔而非刀剑和军队是帝国统治和外交政策的首选工具。”
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


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.

拜占庭文明不欠罗马任何东西。它从古希腊继承了所有的哲学、科学、诗歌、神话和艺术传统。在文化上，它更接近波斯和埃及，而不是意大利，它把意大利当作殖民地。在公元第二个千年之初，它几乎没有任何关于它所谓的拉丁历史的记忆，以至于11世纪最著名的拜占庭哲学家迈克尔·普塞洛斯(Michael Psellos)把西塞罗(Cicero)和凯撒(Caesar)混淆了。
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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?

教科书上君士坦丁的“权力转移”如何符合这个观点?它不符合。事实上，这个概念是非常有问题的。出于充分的理由，君士坦丁不愿意接受基督教传说中君士坦丁为了把罗马留给教皇而在拜占庭定居的说法，历史学家们努力寻找一个合理的解释来说明这一转移，他们通常认为:在旧首都陷入不可挽回的颓废(很快就被高卢人洗劫了)之后，君士坦丁决定把帝国的中心搬到离最危险的边界更近的地方。这说得通吗?即使是这样，一个帝国的首都在一千英里之外的地方转移，有参议员，官僚和军队，导致一个罗马帝国变成另一个罗马帝国，拥有完全不同的政治结构，语言，文化和宗教，这有多可信?

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.

这个荒谬概念的主要来源之一是君士坦丁的虚假捐赠。虽然人们承认这份文件是中世纪教皇伪造的，目的是为了证明他们对罗马的主张是正确的，但它的基本前提——权力转移的叙述——没有受到质疑。我们认为君士坦丁的权力转移实际上是一个神话的幌子，掩盖了真正相反的转移运动，即拜占庭文化向西方的转移，始于十字军东征之前，之后演变为系统的掠夺。中世纪晚期的罗马文化通过相反的君士坦丁堡罗马起源的神话来合理化和掩饰其不那么光荣的拜占庭起源。

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]

关于这一点，将在下一篇文章中变得更加清晰，但这里已经有一个例子，证明了东罗马帝国和西罗马帝国之间公认的从属关系是不可克服的矛盾。罗马人给西方文明留下的最基本、最宝贵的遗产之一就是他们的民法传统。罗马法至今仍是我们法律制度的基础。
那么，罗马法是如何在11世纪末从拜占庭传入意大利的呢?像哈罗德·伯曼(Harold Berman)或阿尔多·斯齐亚沃尼(Aldo Schiavone)这样的专家坚持认为，罗马法的知识在西欧已经完全消失了700年，直到1080年左右，博洛尼亚学者发现了查士丁尼(Justinian)编纂的拜占庭版本(《罗马法典汇编》)。在西方，罗马法“长达700年的衰落”是一个无可争议但几乎不可理解的现象。
（未完待续）