US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has paid tribute to the enduring influence of ancient Greece on the United States and the wider Western world, declaring that Greek civilisation is “literally carved into the architecture” of American institutions.
Speaking at the Pnyx in Athens with the Acropolis behind him, Rubio said the legacy of ancient Greece remains deeply embedded in the political, philosophical and cultural foundations of the West.
“There are great ruins all over the world,” Rubio said. “But the Acropolis is different.”
He said the civilisation that created the monuments of the Acropolis has captivated the imagination of the Western world for thousands of years, inspiring generations of political leaders, artists and philosophers.
“Ancient Greece seems to exert an almost mystical power over our memory. It calls us to return to it again and again,” he said.
From the destruction of Athens to the Parthenon
Rubio reflected on the destruction of Athens in 480 BC, when Persian forces under Xerxes invaded the city and burned its sacred sites.
While most Athenians had evacuated by sea, a small group remained behind and took refuge on the Acropolis.
According to Rubio, the defenders fought a desperate final battle, hurling enormous rocks from the cliffs at the Persian forces and holding off what was then the world’s greatest empire for days.
The Persians eventually overwhelmed the defenders, looting the temples, burning the sanctuaries and destroying the Acropolis.
When the Athenians returned, they gathered the destroyed remains of the old Acropolis and buried them on the hill.
Decades later, under Pericles, the Parthenon was built.
“For 25 centuries, the Parthenon has stood,” Rubio said. “Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow.”
He said the descendants of the people who built it carried their civilisation and ideas across the world.
“A debt that time and distance can never erase”
Rubio then drew a direct connection between ancient Greece and the founding of the United States.
Speaking as US Secretary of State and the descendant of Spanish settlers who arrived in the New World, Rubio said he stood in Athens to acknowledge a debt owed to Greece.
“I stand here to bear witness to a debt that no passage of time and no geographic distance can ever erase,” he said.
“The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity.”
Rubio said Greek influence can be seen throughout the architecture of American institutions, from the towering columns and domes to the monuments of Washington, DC.
He also pointed to Philadelphia, where the US Constitution was created, noting that even the city’s name is Greek.
Plutarch and America’s Founding Fathers
Rubio highlighted the fascination that America’s Founding Fathers had with the ancient world.
He said the founders were deeply educated in history and understood their place within it, but that no period had captured their attention quite like antiquity.
Rubio noted that many people are surprised to learn that the writer referenced most frequently in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or political theorist, but Plutarch, the ancient Greek biographer of the great figures of Greece and Rome.
He said ancient Greece helped shape the ideas that influenced America’s founders and generations of Western thinkers and political leaders.
“Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy,” Rubio said.
He pointed to the Greek origins of concepts surrounding law, virtue, citizenship and democratic government.
Even much of the political vocabulary used today, including “democracy,” “tyranny” and “politics”, has its roots in ancient Greece, he said.
“To know them is to know ourselves”
Rubio argued that America’s debt to Greece extends far beyond political institutions and ideas.
“What we owe to this place, as Americans and as people of the West, is actually much, much deeper,” he said.
The institutions and ideas inherited from ancient Greece, he said, were expressions of a deeper worldview, including how the ancient Greeks understood the world, the virtues they demanded from citizens and the principles they were prepared to defend.
“These were the things they lived for, fought for and died for,” Rubio said.
“To know them is to know ourselves.”
Standing beneath the Acropolis, Rubio said the legacy that emerged from Athens represented the Western world’s enduring drive to discover, understand and define itself.
His remarks placed ancient Greece at the centre of his broader message about the historic ties between Greece and the United States, linking the birthplace of democracy with the foundations of the American Republic.
