Rubio’s selective reading of Ancient Greece

In a speech on Wednesday  to a crowd of 250 invited Greek and European officials, as well as journalists, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to rally European allies, saying they should follow the example of the current government of Greece, to embrace a partnership with the US on everything from “everything from energy to migration to defense, where Greece has been a model ally”.

“We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago,” Rubio said, pointing to positive tendencies including increases in European defense spending, expanded manufacturing and production, and a “flurry” of new partnerships and programs.

To bolster his case, Rubio delivered a selective reading of history from antiquity to the present, saying that the values of the Ancient Greeks imbued those of later scientists and explorers, including some controversial choices such as Christopher Columbus and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, whose legacies are associated with the subjugation of Latin America.

 

Rubio said they, as well as many others, carried a frontier spirit that was born in antiquity.

“The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers – born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world,” he said.

The Acropolis speech was heavily produced, reports The Guardian with four cameras including one mounted on a crane, and was unusual for a secretary of statthrough Iceland, Portugal and finally Greece.

In an unusual aside for the US’s top diplomat, Rubio linked his own journey back to Europe, and then back to the Greeks of antiquity

“I stand here today as the secretary of state of that republic, and a great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain – I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish,” he said.