英语听力：Byzantium-The Lost Empire 拜占庭：失落的帝国-9
时间：2016-01-11 05:39:02
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（单词翻译）
Just like the people of modern Istanbul, the Byzantines loved fresh bread and fresh vegetables. While the bread，at least the grain for it, they brought from their province of Egypt, the vegetables they grew themselves, in little plots beside their houses in the city, in fields in the great green swathe that ran for mile upon mile down the walls of the city, and here’s still a little bit of it today, growing more or less the same crops.
Look at the garlic, the onions, the dill, the dill they used to flavor fish especially those heavy, yellow fish soups they so loved. And this frolic
ecological1 Byzantine delight here, there’s three or four different sorts of crops, there is rocket for salad, there is chard and cabbage again, all sorts of these mint, all growing together in a great
profusion2.
At the end of it all,
lettuce3 to calm your stomach. So and the peasants in the fields, they stopped there for a moment, straightened their backs to watch the lords of Byzantium, those great history
makers4 riding by, they too could think, well, we’re not in such a bad time either.
The Byzantine economy was based on the classic
Mediterranean5 diet: wine, grain, cheese, and vegetables and olives. Olive oil was a
staple6. It was Byzantium’s fuel. It lit streets, and homes and lighthouses, it oiled carts and cured baldness （治愈秃头）①, and it was used for cooking.
In its first centuries, Constantinople’s oil came mostly from northern Syria. This is a wonderful thing. It’s a piece of Byzantine industrial archeology. It’s a factory for making olive oil. This is a marvelous little place. I’ll show you how it works, it’s very sensible very logical.
The olives were picked from the trees, they came down that little street in
wagons7, they were tipped down through a window, and they fell into that trough down there, they were then
scooped8 out of the trough and put into this mill, this is a great oil press for the berries. You see this drum, there were two of those, they fitted on end in here side by side, a bar went between them, and four or five men pushed around the outside and reduced the olives to skin and the stone into a sort of horrible messy
pulp9. That then, was taken out of there, and laid in these circles here. Now this thing in the wall here, held a great beam that ran through the air. And hanging above this was a huge
cylinder10 of stone and that then was slowly dropped onto the massive olive paste and the oil dripped down into these tanks. Not the end, because this, after all, although is cold pressed 冷榨, is actually a very
impure11 oil at this moment. So they take it out of here.
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