 12th annual meeting, some new faces, many old faces, wonderful to have you all here. I want to begin with a few housekeeping issues. The first one is we will make a boat trip on Monday. We need account of all those people who want to go on the boat trip in order to hire the appropriate number of boats. There will be a list at the reception desk, put your name and the number of participants in to make sure that there will be enough boats in the end. The second issue, the Hamam and massage services are working at the hotel. If you have never experienced a Turkish Hamam, I can highly recommend it. You will find out that you are far dirtier than you ever thought you were. That will be at a charge and you will have to schedule an appointment, but as I said, that is a very unique experience. The third item, Paul Gottfried fell ill before he wanted to travel here, so the afternoon schedule will be slightly changed. Bruno Bandulet will speak instead of Paul Gottfried at three o'clock and then instead of Bruno Bandulet being the second speaker in the afternoon, it will be Peter Wong, so the schedule will be slightly shorter, just the slots are changed. Paul Gottfried will not appear. Then I want to remember a great friend who died last year at the age of 80, Ralph Raikow, who played an important role in founding this society. He never made it here because his health had deteriorated. Ralph Raikow was one of the great leaders of the Austro-Liberarian movement. He was a lifelong friend of Murray Rothbard. He attended Mises' seminar as a high school student in New York. He knew Ein Rand, had a fallout with her, just like Rothbard also, and he was one of the very few students who received his PhD under Hayek at the University of Chicago, with his dissertation on the place of religion in the liberal philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Acton. Ralph Raikow was also a great personal friend. I met him shortly after I had moved to the United States in 1985 at the party at Murray Rothbard's house, and I was immediately taken in by his sarcastic wit. I remember, especially fondly, our joint travels that we did in Northern Italy, especially an event when we had been invited by members of the Lega Nord, which at that time was strictly the sessionist in the meantime that has changed significantly. And at some occasion we were scheduled to give speeches at some hotel in Milano, and outside of the hotel there were demonstrations against us, not only against us, against the other speakers as well, with banners against the libertari fascisti. And we were both standing there and laughing. I met Ralph at many, many other occasions too. I should also mention some of his works that I can highly recommend. He was a great wars and great leaders. Then a book that he published in German, I think Ido helped with the German, but Ralph was a Germanophile, a big Germanophile, and that book was called Die Partei der Freiheit, which demonstrated that not all Germans at all times had been statists, but that there were also some radical liberal thinkers in Germany, even a few that came close to my own position. Another book worth mentioning is Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School. Also it was great sadness that I found out that shortly after his 80th birthday he passed away, and all I can say is take a look at Ralph's work, he was truly a great man. This is, I'll give the podium to Sean Gabb. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm first for the chop today, but as ever I'd like to begin by thanking Hans and Gulchin for their great kindness in having invited me to this gathering year after year after year. This is now our 12th conference, it is my 11th, and it is good to see so many friends in the audience, new friends, old friends, friends yet to come. Now when a member of parliament in Britain gets up to speak in the House of Commons, the rules of the House and plain decency require him to declare an interest whenever he may have some financial benefit from what he's about to say. I think this is an entirely just rule and I propose to follow it myself this morning. I've been asked to speak about the value of the Greek and Roman classics. I run the Centre for Ancient Studies, which provides tuition in Greek, Latin and classics. I'm also the author of 12 historical novels set in the Byzantine Empire, and if I can inspire you to a love of the ancient world and to an interest in learning more about it, it may have the collateral advantage of increasing my income. Now this being said, I really do believe in the supreme value and the supreme importance of the Greek and Latin classics. And although most of what I have to say this morning will focus on the Greeks, I do not wish to ignore the Romans. Oh, undoubtedly the main historic function of the Romans was to imitate the Greeks, to preserve Greek culture and to transmit it to ourselves. At the same time, if you focus on the Greeks in a course of classical studies to the exclusion of the Romans, then you will come away with at best an imperfect view of the ancient world. But again and again and again, I would say that the Greeks between about the 6th and the 2nd centuries before Christ were easily, were manifestly, were not quite self-evidently but were very much the most remarkable people who ever lived. If you take yourself to one of the great museums, and I think in my case particularly of the British Museum in London, if you take yourself to one of the great museums, you will see many grand and impressive monuments set up by the Assyrians shall we say, or by the ancient Egyptians. They are grand and impressive, but they are not really for you as ordinary little people. The Assyrian wall carvings in the basement of the British Museum, you see the triumph of King Ashurbanipal, the piled up severed heads, the four skins harvested from the prisons of war, the all to the greater glory of the immortal lord and master Ashurbanipal. If you look at the admittedly more secular and somewhat more humane Egyptian wall paintings, again what you see is kings three or four times taller than the humble people around them and all the evidence of a culture which is focused on the glorification of one man who is himself regarded as a god. These people, if you look at the statues of these people and if the statues look remotely human, you will look into the face of a man who stares back at you with cold disdain. It's quite obvious that when the subject of the statue was alive, he didn't care anything at all about the welfare or the happiness of the people unfortunate enough to be in his control. You can summarise everything these civilisations stood for by quoting the words of Shelly. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look on my works he mighty and despair, so much for the Assyrians, so much for the Egyptians, so much for all of them to be honest. Let us turn to Thucydides, the historian of the long war between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides has a reputation for being a somewhat bleak and cynical historian, a total contrast to Herodotus, that wonderfully chatty man whose statue is down in the harbour because we are currently in the place where Herodotus was born, not the Hotel Caria princess but Bodrum. Thucydides has a reputation for bleakness and cynicism. Let's take one passage from Book 1, chapter 10 of his history. He is talking about why we should not judge the power of Mycenae from the scale of the city's ruins, and he continues by the by, obitidicta. Let us imagine that Sparta were to pass out of existence and all that remained of it were the ruins of its rather unimpressive public buildings and of the mean villages in which its people live. There would be a tendency in future ages to doubt that Sparta had been at all a great power in Greece, yet it presently occupies two-fifths of the Peloponnes and dominates all of it and is undoubtedly a great power in the whole of Greece. If on the other hand, Athens were to pass out of existence, the magnificence of its ruins would persuade many future observers that it had been twice as great as it really was. You can look on the remnants of Egyptian and Assyrian art with awe, or you can be repulsed by it, but what you have here is a rational man. He died thousands of years ago, but he was able to step outside the bounds of his own time and place and to think forward thousands of years into the future, to put himself into your heads and mine, and to ask himself how will this all look to somebody in the remote future? As I said, compare Thucydides and this throwaway comment with the relics of other ancient civilizations. It is not simply a difference of scale, it is a difference of the most fundamental nature. As I said, Thucydides was a rational being. You can imagine sitting him down and having dinner with him and a conversation. You can imagine a meeting of minds. You cannot do that with those 25 foot high kings in the Egyptian wall paintings and wall carvings. That is however just a particular instance of how remarkable the Greeks were. If you look generally, what we can say is that the Greeks gave us virtually all the philosophy we now have. They certainly asked all the questions that we have been trying to answer. They gave us at least the names of all the sciences in which we now excel, and they laid the foundations of the progress that we have made in those sciences during the past 400 years. Their historians were the best. They were the first people to lay down rules for how the human form should be represented in art, and they also came up with the technical means of representing the human form. What we can say from long experience is that any falling off in the quality of how we follow those rules of Greek art are a sure sign that our own civilisation is falling into decadence, that their poets were the best. And yet the Greeks achieved all of this entirely by themselves. Newton said in the 17th century that we were standing on the shoulders of giants, the admissively remarkable progress that our own civilisation has made during the past 400 years is based on the inspiration of earlier peoples and on the imitation of earlier peoples. What the Greeks achieved, they achieved entirely by themselves. They had no models. They had no one to imitate. They had no one to inspire them. What they achieved, they, like a spider, spun out of their own bowels, or two, to shift the metaphor slightly, in a world that had always stood at the midnight point of superstition and tyranny, the Greeks went off like a flash bulb, and we are still bathed by the afterglow of that explosion. I do not say that the Greeks were perfect. They were human beings like us. They had their vices, they had their failings, some of them were thoroughly nasty pieces of work and you would certainly not want to have dinner with some of them. Even so, if you choose to spend the whole of your life staring into the intense light that they gave off, you really will not have lived in vain. If you do this purely through translations, you will often not lose very much. It is rather snobbish of some scholars to say, oh no, you cannot possibly appreciate Greek and Roman culture unless you are completely fluent in their own languages. That is not the case. You can get a very long way purely through the medium of translations. That being said, and without digressing to the point where I make a long advertisement of my own services, this being said, there are a number of benefits to learning, at least ancient Greek. The first is, I suppose, that Greek is inherently a beautiful language. It is something to do with the preponderance of short, open vowels, but I must say there is also, there is also a thrill to seeing it written and there is a thrill to speaking it. Tom d'Apome Bomenos, Procifer Polymetis Odysseus, thus in answer spake the ever resourceful Odysseus. Now, for any number of reasons, my pronunciation of Greek is corrupt. And I have no doubt that any ancient Greek who listened to me, and indeed most modern Greeks who may listen to me, would put their hands over their ears and run screaming from the room. However, the line from Homer that I've just recited was first spoken in a human throat when our ancestors were running around in northern forests with their faces tattooed and butter smeared in their hair. Those sounds were uttered possibly before the building of Stonehenge and certainly they were uttered when Rome itself was a collection of mud huts barely out of the Stone Age. When you recite Homer, in particular, you are making sounds which were made by other human beings a very, very long time ago. You are putting yourself in a profound, yet also a very concrete way with our intellectual, our spiritual and in many cases our genetic ancestors. It is an act of ancestor worship to learn Greek. I cannot get you very far with the Greek studies then. Another reason for learning Greek, the second one, well the second reason for learning Greek is that we know a great deal less about the Greeks than we would like to. Oh, during the past 600 years scholars in Western Europe and then also in America have devoted their entire lives to recovering as much as possible about the Greeks. Every surviving text has been pressed harder than olives for a supermarket chain. The sciences of archaeology and of numismatics and the natural sciences have all been called into play to help in the process of understanding and recovering texts and of learning more about the Greeks. In every century since the 14th, we have been able to say at the end of that century that we know somewhat more about the Greeks than we did at the beginning. This being said, inevitably the ravages of time have carried away much of the evidence and we have a fragmentary view of the ancient world. Looking at the Greeks, and although I'm talking about the Greeks, I'm not forgetting the Romans, looking at the Greeks or the ancients, it is rather like staring over a landscape that is covered in mist. Here and there the mist is absent entirely or it's thinner and you are astonished by the magnificence that you can see. And you can try to extrapolate from the magnificence you see to the magnificence that you can't see. If you do this through the medium of a translation, you are in some respects staring over this already misty and unclear landscape through a sheet of coloured glass. You are not reading the original, you are reading a version made by, no doubt, a very learned scholar, but it is a version made by somebody else. The Latin word to translate is traducco, which means translate. It also means to degrade, to betray, to hold up to ridicule. It means many things, not all of them terribly good. And from this we have the modern French verb traduit. And in a sense, every translation does this. It is not a perfect transposition from one language to another of the words of an author. There is a process of selection, there is a process of reshaping. If you look at the translation that I read to you from Thucydides, that's my translation. And if you look at other people's translations, you'll see that we have all chosen different words and I have also made a few changes to the arrangement and structure of the words to bring out more fully the sense that I wanted to communicate. And every translator does that and you cannot be sure that a translator is doing the kind of job that you would want him to. It is notorious during the past 300 years in the English-speaking world that translators of the ancient classics have worked very hard to disguise the, by our standards, somewhat unconventional sexual tastes of the ancients. There has been a strong reaction against that during the past 50 years and you can now read in English, at least, the most shocking things written by the Greeks and Romans. At the same time, the ancients had a strong partiality for mood-altering substances and this is generally airbrushed out of the translations. You'll read that someone drank wine mixed with herbs. Really? What kind of herbs? Coriander perhaps? Mint? No. You can imagine what kind of herbs they were mixing into their wine. It's just that the translations make it so bland, so anodyne that you just brush over it and carry on to the next substantive point, missing out the very important fact that the ancients for much of the time were off their heads on drugs. For many purposes, in order to see what the ancients were saying, it is highly useful to have some understanding of the ancient languages. The last reason, there are many reasons but I'm not making an advertising presentation, there are many reasons for learning these languages, but the last one that comes to mind is that if you take the stories in Homer, they seem to translate with almost no loss from Greek into any other language. When I was a boy at seven, and I first discovered the Greeks, I read the story of Odysseus in the cave of Polyphemus, we all know that story, don't we? The one-eyed monster who eats the men? If you don't know it, it's worth looking up. It's a wonderful story and it worked for me in English, it thrilled me, or there is the story in the Iliad of how Achilles ties the dead body of Hector to his chariot and drags it around the walls of Troy, and of how the father of Hector, Priam, has to come out of Troy and buy the body back. A very moving story, and it worked in English translation when I was a boy, and these stories work in virtually any translation you care to mention, as long as it's competent. It works on film. You can translate Homer obviously with some loss, there's always a loss, but nothing noticeable in many cases. There are many other authors, however, who do not translate very well. And last Easter, I held a revision course in A-level classical civilization, and one of the modules required the students to be familiar with a number of good English translations of the Aeneid by Virgil. Except for the translation into verse in the 17th century by John Dryden, I had never actually read a translation of the Aeneid, and I found it a disappointing and often a frustrating experience. Lines and phrases and blocks of lines, which in the original had gone straight into my memory and stayed there, were almost invisible in the English version. I would say to the students, I know we're coming up to a very important and profound statement, and you'd look at the translation and it would say something like, you should not count your chickens before they're hatched, or you just wouldn't find what you're looking for, because the translations were made by men of far greater learning than I. It's just that where Virgil is concerned, and where many other writers are concerned, but where Virgil is concerned, the main hero of the Aeneid is not Aeneas and his journey from Troy to the site where he would found Rome. The main hero in the Aeneid is Virgil and the Latin language. Virgil was doing things that nobody previously had thought it was possible to do in Latin, and he was doing things that nobody ever again would be able to do. The language is as much the subject of the poem as the formal characters and the formal plot. But now, let's take the opening of book two of the Aeneid. Again, I regret my pronunciation is utterly corrupt, and Virgil would probably die of horror if he would be wrought forward and put in the audience, but that is the opening of book two of the Aeneid. I won't translate this myself, because that is not my purpose. I'll instead read from the translation made in 20.05 by Stanley Holloway. The room fell silent, all eyes on Aeneas. Who from his high couch now began to speak? My queen, you are asking me to relive unspeakable sorrow to recall how the Greeks pulled down Troy, that tragic realm with all its riches. I would have translated the words differently, but probably not much better. For the Romans, Virgil stood at the absolute summit of their linguistic achievement. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Virgil was the unapproachable master of language. For Tennyson, Virgil was wielder of the stateliest measure ever molded by the lips of men. Yet, you tell me honestly, if you listen to this translation by Stanley Lombardo, the room fell silent, all eyes on Aeneas. Is there any sense of the crisp and almost peremptory opening line in that passage? Is there anything of the grand and almost impossible magnificence of everything that follows? I don't think so. If you read Virgil in translation, you're reading an extraordinarily flat and prosaic piece of English literature. It gives you no impression of the original or its effect. And so that is another reason for learning at least one of the ancient languages. Now, I, so far, I have ignored the fact that we are a broadly political gathering. And so I feel obliged to say something about the politics of the matter. When at the age of 17, I came out as a libertarian. I took a highly local view of libertarian philosophy or libertarian ideology. It was rather like a car. You notice one of your tires is flat. You pump it up again. Or if it can't be pumped up, you replace it. You don't start worrying about the engine or the transmission or the brakes. You don't think to yourself, perhaps rust has attacked the underbody. And I should get that checked as well. Now you pump up your tire and you turn the key and lock and you drive off. And I took a similar view of libertarianism in the late 1970s. Inflation is rather high. We need to do something about that. We need to cut taxes. We need to bring the trade unions to a better understanding of the interests of their members. Oh, we must legalize drugs and porn and kinky sex and all that stuff. But otherwise, the world is fine enough. And if you'd asked me for a libertarian view on music, I'd have given you a funny look. I'd have thought it was a bit like asking for a libertarian view on the speed of light. And indeed, that would not have been an entirely illegitimate line to take when I was 17 and I came out as a libertarian. Most of the important Labour politicians in Britain would have agreed with me that culture was, or ought to be, autonomous of politics and economics. I was later brought to a better understanding of these matters by my late and still much lamented friend, Chris Artaime. And we both, as time went by, came to realize that during the 1980s, it began much later in the 1980s, but it became evident for all to see in the 80s, by the 1980s, socialism had changed in its fundamental nature. Now, I spoke about this last year when I discussed Margaret Thatcher's achievement. And so I don't need to go into any length about it this year. I will simply say that whereas earlier generations of socialists were interested in raising the condition of ordinary working people, and generally they adopted the wrong means to what was an entirely praiseworthy end, by the 1980s, socialists had decided that the way to achieve total hegemony within a society so that they could change the politics and the economics as they pleased was first to gain hegemony in cultural matters. And this they have done with considerable success. We are pretty well outclassed. We may have the right arguments, but we are outclassed by the leftists in every sense that matters. They have the critical mass of people. They control the institutions. They control the funding. Whatever we try to do is as a drop of honey dissolved in the sea. It doesn't matter within reason what you do. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to have any substantial long-term impact on the leftist-dominated culture around you. Now, it is slightly different where classical studies are concerned. It is different in a number of respects. First, it is a much smaller area of study. Oh, the subject matter itself is vast. But the number of people is quite small, and the funding is quite small. And so there are not that many classicists about. And certainly, there is none of the big money that you see in the social sciences to corrupt the classics profession. Another reason is that any plodding fool or fanatic can put on the relevant gown and call himself a professor of English literature or a professor of sociology. If you want to be the humblest schoolmaster of Greek or Latin, there are certain linguistic barriers over which you must jump and certain technical skills that you must learn and internalise. And although I would not underestimate the leftist enemy, there is also no doubt that these people are of much lower personal quality in the present generation than they were 50 or 60 years ago. There really is no modern equivalent of Michel Foucault, least of all of Antonio Gramsci or Louis Alterser or Roland Barthes. These people were no doubt very wicked, and certainly they were wrong. But they were also persons of considerable quality, and the modern left does not seem able to reproduce that kind of quality within its own ranks. And so it is at a comparative disadvantage when it comes to taking over the classics. And indeed, even if they do try to take over the classics, the subject matter itself is intractable. I will say in all plainness and bluntness that the sexual tastes of the ancients did not conform to our rather binary conception of these matters. At the same time, any attempt at queering the classics, I think that's the phrase that's currently used, any attempt at queering the classics will crash straight into the brick wall of the surviving evidence. The Greeks and Romans were not entirely as we are, but anyone who says that classical Athens was the counterpart of a San Francisco bathhouse, it really is talking through his hat. But of course, if you're a feminist, what approach can you take to the classics? You can denounce them. You can shake your fist. You can try asking people not to read them. No. The ancient writers were non-leftists. We're not actually anti-leftists. They take a highly realistic view of the world and of the human condition within it. And classical studies do not lend themselves to leftist indoctrination. My last point, my concluding point, no less, is that the classics have prestige. Even though Greek and Latin have been effectively driven from the state sector of British education, the Greeks and Romans have as much prestige as they ever had. Now, if someone tells you that the Aztecs were nature-worshipping vegetarians, he is lying, or he's repeating somebody else's lies, but really, who cares about the Aztecs? For that matter, who cares about the ancient Egyptians or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or anyone? Whatever precedence they may have set, they had no binding force on us. But the Greeks and Romans, hmm, the Greeks and Romans, they're special, aren't they? Even if you haven't spent your life obsessed by them, you know that the Greeks and Romans are special and their precedents are very much things for us to follow. And so if we make an effort and we reach out and we colonize classical studies, in much the same way as we have always dominated certain areas of economics, we shall not be winning the culture war that was started against us 50, 60, whatever years ago, but we shall be dragging the enemy onto a battlefield in which the correlation of forces is not as absolutely against us as it is in other academic areas and in which we can expect to win a significant victory. And so with those words, ladies and gentlemen, I hope I have said something, do not expect me to say everything because there is so much more to say, but I do hope I've said something about the importance and the value of the Greek and Roman classics. Many thanks.