On Wednesday, I traveled to the Pnyx, a hillside overlooking the towering columns of the Acropolis in Athens.There, I delivered a simple message: The West is at a crossroads.
The decisions we make in the next decade will define the next century – and determine whether our civilization maintains its place at the head of the world, or resigns itself to a future of servitude and decline.For thousands of years, the Parthenon has stood as a testament to the Western spirit, captivating the imagination of our civilization’s artists, philosophers, and statesmen.The American Founding Fathers were fascinated by classical antiquity: The most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome’s greatest men.
The legacy of ancient Greece is carved into the architecture of our capital city itself, immediately visible in the famous columns and domes of Washington, D.C.We all know the familiar history.Athens gave us democracy.
Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy.The Greek city-states shaped our ideas of citizenship, law and republican government.RUBIO SOUNDS CAMPAIGN-READY AS HE RAILS AGAINST OPEN BORDERS, GLOBALISM IN SPEECH FROM ANCIENT GREEK RUINSBut our debt to Greece runs deeper than any particular political system or theory.Ancient Greece was the birthplace of all the essential qualities that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; restless curiosity, creativity, and invention; an insatiable desire for adventure, glory, and exploration, straining to test the limits of what man can know and do.Today, we find ourselves at an inflection point – not just in the United States, but across the whole of Western civilization.What the West inherited from classical Greece is not just the ambition to explore the unknown; it is the conviction that the unknown can be known. The Greeks believed the world could be observed, measured, mapped and understood.
That conviction became the...