Who were the first “Romans”
One obvious obxtion to the idea that the relationship between Rome and Constantinople has been inverted is that the Byzantines called themselves Romans (Romaioi), and believed they were living in Romania. Persians, Arabs and Turks called them Roumis. Even the Greeks of the Hellenic Peninsula called themselves Romaioi in Late Antiquity, despite their detestation of the Latins. This is taken as proof that the Byzantines considered themselves the heirs of the Roman Empire of the West, founded in Rome, Italy. But it is not. Strangely enough, mythography and etymology both suggest that, just like the name “Caesar”, the name “Rome” travelled from East to West, rather than the other way. Romos, latinized in Romus or Remus, is a Greek word meaning “strong”. The Italian Romans were Etruscans from Lydia in Asia Minor. They were well aware of their eastern origin, the memory of which was preserved in their legends. According to the tradition elaborated by Virgil in his epic Aeneid, Rome was founded by Aeneas from Troy, in the immediate vicinity of the Bosphorus. According to another version, Rome was founded by Romos, the son of Odysseus and Circe.[18] The historian Strabo, supposedly living in the first century BC (but quoted only from the fifth century AD), reports that “another older tradition makes Rome an Arcadian colony,” and insists that “Rome itself was of Hellenic origin” (Geographia V, 3). Denys of Halicarnassus in his Roman Antiquities, declares “Rome is a Greek city.” His thesis is summed up by the syllogism: “The Romans descend from the Trojans. But the Trojans are of Greek origin. So the Romans are of Greek origin.”

谁是最早的“罗马人”?
对于罗马和君士坦丁堡之间的关系被颠倒的观点，一个明显的反对意见是，拜占庭人称自己为罗马人(Romaioi)，并相信他们生活在罗马尼亚。波斯人、阿拉伯人和土耳其人称他们为鲁米人。即使是古希腊半岛上的希腊人在古代晚期也称自己为罗马人，尽管他们厌恶拉丁人。这被认为是拜占庭人认为自己是在意大利罗马建立的西罗马帝国的继承人的证据。但事实并非如此。
奇怪的是，就像“凯撒”这个名字一样，神话学和词源学都表明，“罗马”这个名字是从东方传到西方的，而不是相反。Romos，拉丁化为Romus或Remus，是一个希腊语单词，意思是“强壮”。意大利罗马人是来自小亚细亚吕底亚的伊特鲁里亚人。他们很清楚自己来自东方，关于东方的记忆保存在他们的传说中。根据维吉尔在他的史诗《埃涅阿斯纪》中阐述的传统，罗马是由特洛伊的埃涅阿斯在博斯普鲁斯海峡附近建立的。根据另一种说法，罗马是由奥德修斯和喀耳刻的儿子罗莫斯建立的。
据推测生活在公元前1世纪的历史学家斯特拉博(但只引用了公元5世纪的资料)的说法，“另一个更古老的传统使罗马成为阿卡迪亚殖民地”，并坚持认为“罗马本身起源于希腊”(《地理五》)。哈利卡那苏斯的丹尼斯在他的《罗马古物》中宣称“罗马是一座希腊城市”。他的论点可以用三段论来概括:“罗马人起源于特洛伊人。但特洛伊人起源于希腊。所以罗马人起源于希腊。”

The famous legend of Romulus and Remus, told by Titus Livy (I, 3), is generally considered of later origin. It could very well be an invention of the late Middle Age. Anatoly Fomenko, of whom we will have more to say later on, believes that its central theme, the simultaneous foundation of two cities, one by Romulus on the Palatine Hill, and the other by Remus on the Aventine, is a mythical reflection of the struggle for ascendency between the two Romes. As we shall see, the murder of Remus by Romulus is a fitting allegory of the events unfolding from the fourth crusade.[19] Interestingly, that legend evokes the history of the brothers Valens and Valentinian, who are said to have reigned respectively over Constantinople and Rome from 364 to 378 (their story is known from one single author, Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek writing in Latin). It happens that valens is a Latin equivalent for the Greek romos.

著名的“罗穆卢斯和雷穆斯”的传说，由提图斯·李维讲述(1,3)，通常被认为是后来的起源。它很可能是中世纪晚期的杜撰。关于阿纳托利·福门科，我们将在后面详细介绍，他认为它的中心主题，两个城市同时建立，一个由罗穆卢斯在帕拉廷山上建立，另一个由雷穆斯在阿文丁山上建立，是两个罗马之间争夺优势地位的斗争的神话反映。
正如我们将看到的，罗穆卢斯谋杀雷穆斯是第四次十字军东征事件展开的一个恰当的寓言。[19]有趣的是，这个传说让人想起了瓦伦斯和瓦伦提尼安兄弟的历史，据说他们分别在364年到378年统治君士坦丁堡和罗马(他们的故事只有一个作者知道，Ammianus Marcellinus，一个用拉丁语写成的希腊作品)。valens恰好是希腊语romos的拉丁语对应词。

We have started this article by suggesting that much of the history of the Western Roman Empire is of Renaissance invention. But as we progress in our investigation, another complementary hypothesis will emerge: much of the history of the Western Roman Empire is borrowed from the history of the Eastern Roman Empire, either by deliberate plagiarism, or by confusion resulting from the fact that the Byzantines called themselves Romans and their city Rome. The process can be inferred from some obvious duplicates. Here is one example, taken from Latin historian Jordanes, whose Origin and Deeds of the Goths is notoriously full of anachronisms: in 441, Attila crossed the Danube, invaded the Balkans, and threatened Constantinople, but could not take the city and retreated with an immense booty. Ten years later, the same Attila crossed the Alps, invaded Italy, and threatened Rome, but couldn’t take the city and retreated with an immense booty .

我们在这篇文章的开头就提出，西罗马帝国的大部分历史都是文艺复兴时期的杜撰。但随着我们研究的深入，另一个互补的假设将会出现：西罗马帝国的大部分历史都是从东罗马帝国借来的，要么是故意抄袭，要么是由于拜占庭人称自己为罗马人和他们的城市罗马这一事实造成的混淆。
这个过程可以从一些明显的重复中推断出来。这里有一个例子，摘自拉丁历史学家Jordanes，他的《哥特人的起源与事迹》是出了名的充满时代错误：公元441年，阿提拉越过多瑙河，入侵巴尔干半岛，威胁君士坦丁堡，但未能占领这座城市，并带着大量战利品撤退。十年后，同一个阿提拉翻越阿尔卑斯山，入侵意大利，威胁罗马，但没能拿下罗马城，带着大量战利品撤退了。

The mysterious origin of Latin
Another obxtion against questioning the existence of the Western Roman Empire is the spread of Latin throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. It is admitted that Latin, originally the language spoken in the Latium, is the origin of French, Italian, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese, called “Western Romance Languages”. However, the amateur historian and linguist M. J. Harper has made the following remark:
“The linguistic evidence mirrors the geography with great precision: Portuguese resembles Spanish more than any other language; French resembles Occitan more than any other; Occitan resembles Catalan, Catalan resembles Spanish and so forth. So which was the Ur-language? Can’t tell; it could be any of them. Or it could be a language that has long since disappeared. But the original language cannot have been Latin. All the Romance languages, even Portuguese and Italian, resemble one another more than any of them resemble Latin, and do so by a wide margin.”[20]

拉丁语的神秘起源
另一个驳斥质疑西罗马帝国存在的理由是拉丁语在地中海及其他地区的传播。人们承认，拉丁语最初是拉丁地区的语言，是法语、意大利语、奥克西坦语、加泰罗尼亚语、西班牙语和葡萄牙语的起源，被称为“西方罗曼语”。然而，业余历史学家和语言学家M. J. Harper做了如下评论:
“语言证据非常精确地反映了地理：葡萄牙语比其他任何语言都更像西班牙语；法语比其他语言更像欧西坦语；欧西坦语类似加泰罗尼亚语，加泰罗尼亚语类似西班牙语等等。那么哪种是原始语言呢?说不清楚。可能是它们中的任何一个，也可能是一种早已消失的语言。但最初的语言不可能是拉丁语。所有的罗曼语，甚至包括葡萄牙语和意大利语，彼此之间的相似程度都超过了它们与拉丁语之间的相似程度，而且差距很大。”

For that reason, linguists postulate that “Romance languages” do not derive directly from Latin, but from Vulgar Latin, the popular and colloquial sociolect of Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers, and merchants of the Roman Empire. What was Vulgar Latin, or proto-Romance, like? No one knows.
As a matter of fact, the language that most resembles Latin is Romanian, which, although divided in several dialects, constitutes by itself the only member of the Eastern branch of Romance languages. It is the only Romance language that has maintained archaic traits of Latin, such as the case system (endings of words depending on their role in the sentence) and the neutral gender.[21]

因此，语言学家假设“罗曼语”并非直接来源于拉丁语，而是来源于通俗拉丁语，即罗马帝国士兵、定居者和商人所使用的通俗拉丁语。通俗拉丁语或原始罗曼语是什么样子的?没人知道。
事实上，与拉丁语最相似的语言是罗马尼亚语，尽管它分为几种方言，但它本身是罗曼语东部分支的唯一成员。它是唯一一种保留了拉丁语的古老特征的罗曼语，比如大小写系统(单词的结尾取决于它们在句子中的作用)和中性。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


But how did Romanians come to speak Vulgar Latin? There is another mystery there. Part of the linguistic area of Romanian was conquered by Emperor Trajan in 106 AD, and formed the Roman province of Dacia for a mere 165 years. One or two legions were stationed in the South-West of Dacia, and, although not Italians, they are supposed to have communicated in Vulgar Latin and imposed their language to the whole country, even north of the Danube, where there was no Roman presence. What language did people speak in Dacia before the Romans conquered the south part of it? No one has a clue. The “Dacian language” “is an extinct language, … poorly documented. … only one Dacian inscxtion is believed to have survived.” Only 160 Romanian words are hypothetically of Dacian origin. Dacian is believed to be closely related to Thracian, itself “an extinct and poorly attested language.”

但是罗马尼亚人是如何开始说通俗拉丁语的呢?这里还有另一个谜团。公元106年，图拉真皇帝(Emperor Trajan)征服了罗马尼亚语的部分地区，并在165年的时间里成为罗马的达契亚省(Dacia)。有一两个军团驻扎在达契亚的西南部，虽然他们不是意大利人，但据说他们用通俗的拉丁语交流，并把他们的语言强加给整个国家，甚至在多瑙河以北，那里没有罗马人的存在。
在罗马人征服达契亚南部之前，那里的人说什么语言?没人知道。“达契亚语”是一种已经灭绝的语言，记录很少。只有一个达契亚铭文被认为保存了下来。”只有160个罗马尼亚词是源于达契亚语。达契亚语被认为与色雷斯语密切相关，色雷斯语本身是“一种灭绝且证据不足的语言”。

Let me repeat: The inhabitants of Dacia north of the Danube adopted Latin from the non-Italian legions that stationed on the lower part of their territory from 106 to 271 AD, and completely forgot their original language, to the point that no trace of it is left. They were so Romanized that their country came to be called Romania, and that Romanian is now closer to Latin than are other European Romance languages. Yet the Romans hardly ever occupied Dacia (on the map above, Dacia is not even counted as part of the Roman Empire). The next part is also extraordinary: Dacians, who had so easily given up their original language for Vulgar Latin, then became so attached to Vulgar Latin that the German invaders, who caused the Romans to retreat in 271, failed to impose their language. So did the Huns and, more surprisingly, the Slavs, who dominated the area since the seventh century and left many traces in the toponymy. Less than ten percent of Romanian words are of Slavic origin (but the Romanians adopted Slavonic for their liturgy).

让我重复一遍:
多瑙河以北的达契亚的居民从公元106年至271年驻扎在他们领土下部的非意大利军团那里接受了拉丁语，完全忘记了他们原来的语言，以至于没有留下任何痕迹。他们的罗马化程度如此之高，以至于他们的国家被称为罗马尼亚，而罗马尼亚语现在比其他欧洲罗曼语更接近拉丁语。然而，罗马人几乎从未占领过达契亚(在上面的地图上，达契亚甚至不被算作罗马帝国的一部分)。接下来的部分也很不寻常:达契亚人很容易就放弃了自己的原始语言，转而使用通俗拉丁语，后来又对通俗拉丁语如此依恋，以至于271年迫使罗马人撤退的日耳曼入侵者，也没能把他们的语言强加给他们。
更令人惊讶的是，匈奴人也是如此，自7世纪以来他们统治该地区的斯拉夫人，在地名上留下了许多痕迹。然而只有不到10%的罗马尼亚语来源于斯拉夫语(但罗马尼亚人在他们的礼拜仪式中采用了斯拉夫语)。

One more thing: although Latin was a written language in the Empire, Romanians are believed to have never had a written language until the Middle Ages. The first document written in Romanian goes back to the sixteenth century, and it is written in Cyrillic alphabet.
Obviously, there is room for the following alternative theory: Latin is a language originating from Dacia; ancient Dacian did not vanish mysteriously but is the common ancestor of both Latin and modern Romanian. Dacian, if you will, is Vulgar Latin, which preceded Classical Latin. A likely explanation for the fact that Dacia is also called Romania is that it—rather than Italy—was the original home of the Romans who founded Constantinople.[22] That would be consistent with the notion that the Roman language (Latin) remained the administrative language of the Eastern Empire until the sixth century AD, when it was abandoned for Greek, the language spoken by the majority of its subjects.

还有一件事:
尽管拉丁语在帝国时期是一种书面语言，但人们认为罗马尼亚人直到中世纪才有了书面语言。第一份用罗马尼亚语写的文件可以追溯到16世纪，它是用西里尔字母写的。
很明显，以下另一种理论是有商讨余地的：
拉丁语是一种起源于达契亚的语言；古达契亚人并没有神秘地消失，而是拉丁语和现代罗马尼亚语的共同祖先。达契亚语，如果你愿意的话，是古拉丁语之前的通俗拉丁语。达契亚之所以被称为罗马尼亚，一个可能的解释是，它是建立君士坦丁堡的罗马人的故乡，而不是意大利。 这与罗马语(拉丁语)一直是东罗马帝国的行政语言的概念是一致的，直到公元6世纪，罗马语被希腊语所取代，希腊语是其大多数臣民使用的语言。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


That, in turn, is consistent with the character of Latin itself. Harper makes the following remark:
“Latin is not a natural language. When written, Latin takes up approximately half the space of written Italian or written French (or written English, German or any natural European language). Since Latin appears to have come into existence in the first half of the first millennium BC, which was the time when alphabets were first spreading through the Mediterranean basin, it seems a reasonable working hypothesis to assume that Latin was originally a shorthand compiled by Italian speakers for the purposes of written (confidential? commercial?) communication. This would explain:
a) the very close concordance between Italian and Latin vocabulary;
b) the conciseness of Latin in, for instance, dispensing with separate prepositions, compound verb forms and other ‘natural’ language impedimenta;
c) the unusually formal rules governing Latin grammar and syntax;
d) the lack of irregular, non-standard usages;
e) the unusual adoption among Western European languages of a specifically vocative case (‘Dear Marcus, re. you letter of…’).[23]
The hypothesis that Latin was a “non-demotic” language, a koine of the empire, a cultural artifact developed for the purpose of writing, was first proposed by Russian researchers Igor Davidenko and Jaroslav Kesler in The Book of Civilizations (2001).

这反过来又与拉丁语本身的特点相一致。哈珀说:
“拉丁语不是一种自然语言。在书写时，拉丁语所占的空间大约是意大利语或法语(或英语、德语或任何欧洲自然语言)的一半。由于拉丁语似乎是在公元前一千年的上半叶出现的，也就是字母表第一次在地中海盆地传播的时候，一个合理的假设是，拉丁语最初是说意大利语的人为了书面(保密?商业?)通信而发明的。这可以解释:
a)意大利语和拉丁语词汇非常一致；
b)拉丁语的简练，例如，省去了单独的介词、复合动词形式和其他“自然”语言障碍；
c)支配拉丁语语法和句法的不寻常的正式规则;
d)缺乏不规则、不标准的用法;
e)在西欧语言中不同寻常地采用了一个特殊的呼召格(“亲爱的马库斯，请听你……月……日的来信”)。
假设拉丁语是一种“非平民”语言，是帝国的共通语，是一种为写作而发展起来的文化产物，这是由俄罗斯研究人员伊戈尔·达维登科和雅罗斯拉夫·凯斯勒在《文明之书》(2001)中首次提出的。

How old is ancient Roman architecture?
The strongest obxtion against the theory that ancient Imperial Rome is a fiction is, of course, her many architectural vestiges. This subject will be more fully explored in a later article, but a quotation from Viscount James Bryce’s influential work, The Holy Roman Empire (1864), will point to the answer:
“The modern traveller, after his first few days in Rome, when he has looked out upon the Campagna from the summit of St. Peter’s, paced the chilly corridors of the Vatican, and mused under the echoing dome of the Pantheon, when he has passed in review the monuments of regal and republican and papal Rome, begins to seek for some relics of the twelve hundred years that lie between Constantine and Pope Julius the Second. ‘Where,’ he asks, ‘is the Rome of the Middle Ages, the Rome of Alberic and Hildebrand and Rienzi? the Rome which dug the graves of so many Teutonic hosts; whither the pilgrims flocked; whence came the commands at which kings bowed? Where are the memorials of the brightest age of Christian architecture, the age which reared Cologne and Rheims and Westminster, which gave to Italy the cathedrals of Tuscany and the wave-washed palaces of Venice?’ To this question there is no answer. Rome, the mother of the arts, has scarcely a building to commemorate those times.”

古罗马建筑有多古老?
当然，反对古代罗马帝国是虚构的理论的最强烈的理由是她的许多建筑遗迹。这个问题将在后面的文章中进行更全面的探讨，但詹姆斯·布莱斯子爵颇具影响力的著作《神圣罗马帝国》(1864)中的一段话将指出答案:
“现代的旅行者，在来到罗马的头几天，当他站在圣彼得大教堂的顶峰眺望大平原，在梵蒂冈寒冷的走廊里踱步，在万神殿的穹顶下沉思，当他浏览完罗马帝国时期、共和时期和教皇时期的纪念物之后，就开始寻找君士坦丁和教皇尤利乌斯二世之间1200年的遗迹。他问道:“中世纪的罗马，阿尔伯里克、希尔德布兰德和里恩齐的罗马在哪里?”那个为许多日耳曼人掘墓的罗马;朝圣者蜂拥而去;国王鞠躬的命令从何而来? 基督教建筑最辉煌时代的纪念碑在哪里?那个时代孕育了科隆、兰斯和威斯敏斯特，给意大利带来了托斯卡纳的大教堂和威尼斯被海浪冲刷过的宫殿。
这些问题没有答案。作为艺术之母的罗马，几乎没有一座建筑来纪念那个时代。”

Officially, there is hardly a medi vestige in Rome, and the same applies to other Italian cities believed to have been founded during Antiquity. François de Sarre, a French contributor to the field of research here presented, was first intrigued by the magnificent palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian (284-305 AD), in the center of the city of Split, today in Croatia. The Renaissance constructions are integrated to it in such a perfect architectural ensemble as to be almost indistinguishable. It is hard to believe that ten centuries separate the two stages of construction, as if the ancient buildings had been left untouched during the whole Middle Ages.

根据官方说法，罗马几乎没有中世纪的遗迹，其他被认为是在古代建立的意大利城市也是如此。Franois de Sarre是一位在这里介绍的研究领域做出贡献的法国人，他首先被罗马皇帝戴克里先(公元284-305年)宏伟的宫殿所吸引，这座宫殿位于斯普利特市的中心，今天在克罗地亚。
文艺复兴时期的建筑与它融为一体，形成了一个完美的建筑群，几乎无法区分。很难相信，10个世纪将两个建筑阶段分开了，就好像这些古老的建筑在整个中世纪都没有被碰触过一样



同样令人费解的、鲜为人知的事实是，古罗马建筑使用了先进的技术，如质量卓越的混凝土，例如用于建造万神殿保存完好的圆顶。维特鲁威的多卷著作《建筑学》(公元前1世纪)描述了罗马混凝土的制造秘密。我们被告知，中世纪的人完全不知道这项技术，因为“维特鲁威的作品在很大程度上被遗忘了，直到1414年，当De architectura被佛罗伦萨人文主义者Poggio Bracciolini在Saint Gall Abbey图书馆“重新发现”(维基百科)。


As a temporary conclusion: all the oddities that we have pointed out are like pieces of a puzzle that do not fit well within our conventional representation. We will later be able to assemble them into a more plausible picture. But before that, in the next article, we will focus on ecclesiastical literature from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, for it is the original source of the great historical distortion that later took a life of its own before being standardized as the dogma of modern chronology and historiography.

作为一个临时的结论:
我们所指出的所有怪事就像拼图的碎片，不适合我们传统的表象。稍后我们将能够把它们组合成一幅更合理的图画。
在下一篇文章中，我们将重点关注从古代晚期到中世纪的教会文学，因为它是历史庞杂扭曲的原始来源，后来在被规范为现代年代学和史学的教条之前，它有自己的一套叙述。
（完）