翻译概论综述 pt.1

What interested him, he explained, were the mechanisms that kept the Roman empire functioning, and how grit worked its way inexorably into the cogs. Rome never had an administrative state as developed as anything we know today, but when it worked, it worked pretty well. What MacMullen called a “train of power” linked authority at the center to faraway commanders and distant magistrates, to minters of coin and provisioners of ships—all the way “to a hundred cobblers in the Bay-of-Naples area, a hundred peasant owners of ox-carts in Cappadocia.”