Yesterday, I had my hair and makeup done and a seat in the Fox News green room when Marco Rubio took my slot.
Fox invited me on The Faulkner Focus after the New York Post quoted me in its story on Jewish families who pull their children out of public schools as antisemitism grows. The producers told me that a speech by the Secretary of State could bump my segment. It did, and I could not ask for a better reason. I watched from the green room as Rubio stood before the Acropolis in Athens and told the West to stop apologizing for itself.
Rubio delivered his speech on the third anniversary of October 7. On that day in 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 people and dragged about 250 more into Gaza as hostages. Hamas attacked Israel and Jews everywhere, and three years later it is clear that it was an attack on Western civilization itself.
Now that this horrible anniversary is behind us and as we approach Columbus Day (now known as Indigenous People’s Day), parents face a practical question: what story do we tell our kids? They now regularly hear that America’s founding is a crime and our legacy is a reason for shame.
Rubio tells our story very differently — all Americans deserve to hear his version.
Rubio reminds us that our very words for democracy and politics come from Greek, and that our idea of a self-governing republic took shape in the Greek city-states. Even the name Philadelphia, the city where the founders wrote our Constitution, comes from Greek and means “brotherly love.” None of this gives us a reason for guilt.
It gives us a reason for pride and a reason to defend what we inherited.
The speech opens with a story every child ought to know by heart. In 480 BC, the Persian king Xerxes marched on Athens and burned it. A handful of Athenians refused to leave and barricaded themselves on the Acropolis. They rolled boulders down the cliffs and held off the largest empire on earth for days, until the Persians overran them and torched the temples. The Athenians came back to the ashes, gathered the broken statues, and buried them in the hill.
About thirty years later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon on that same rock. It still stands 25 centuries later. They buried their dead and built something even greater on the same ground.
What Rubio said to the West
He names the problem in our education system:
“Too often, these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure that no one will lose.”
“In too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.”
He draws a hard line between Western heroes and the Iranian regime, which hails child suicide bombers as national heroes:
“Our heroes may be willing to die for their cause, but our heroes do not worship death.”
And he reminds us where it all began:
“The Greeks did not just shape history. The Greeks gave us history itself.”
“The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves. It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud.”
Watch it together
Please watch the full speech with your kids. It runs about 25 minutes and asks for sustained attention, which our children rarely get to practice. Sit beside them and pause when they have questions. Rubio calls the story of our civilization “the greatest story ever known to man.” Our kids deserve to hear someone say that out loud and really mean it.
The people who celebrate murder will never win while leaders like Marco Rubio are among us!
Natalya
The speech
Remarks by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Acropolis, Athens, October 7, 2026. Lightly edited for clarity. Brackets mark words added for clarity. [...] marks passages cut for length.
The last stand on the Acropolis
There are great ruins all across the world. In many cases, they are places where history seems to have exhausted itself, remnants of distant cultures that have long passed beyond living memory.
But the Acropolis is different. For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world.
Generations of our statesmen, artists, and philosophers have looked to it, and looked to it with wonder, and looked to it with awe. Now, time has a tendency to dull the senses. Great victories and catastrophic defeats seem to shrink to becoming like a footnote in a textbook. Another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget. But the Greeks of antiquity seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory.
They call us back to them again and again. 480 years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city, and they put its sanctuaries to the torch. Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island, but there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home. So instead, they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders, and holding the greatest empire of that age at bay for days. They were eventually overwhelmed. The Persians plundered the temples, they burned the shrines, they razed the Acropolis to the ground.
When the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood. Decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon. For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood. Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow, and the progeny of the men who built it, the sons of Athens and Rome, have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the earth.
Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American Republic, halfway across the world from where I stand now, I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that republic, and as the 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.
What America owes to Greece
The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government, in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our Constitution was born, Philadelphia, is itself a Greek name.
The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours. They were exceptionally well read in history. They were vividly aware of their unique place in it, but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity. Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or a political theorist. The most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome’s great men.
Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American founders, and for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them. Most of us are familiar with the basic history. Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, of virtue, citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states. Even much of our political vocabulary, words like democracy, tyranny, the word politics itself, found its origins here.
All of that is true, but the things we owe to this place as Americans and as Westerners actually [go] far [beyond] these institutions and ideas. These institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks, qualities that can’t be reduced to any particular political system.
Here in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition, daring exploration and invention, a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory, an insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos, an impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries, at all limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.
These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy. They were the characteristics of a people, expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination, in the qualities that they demanded of their citizens, and the things they lived and fought and died for. To know them is to know ourselves. What blossomed here, in this place, was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man. The Greeks did not just shape history. The Greeks gave us history itself.
Much of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians, explorers and historians who didn’t just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outward to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world. Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait that would push the West to create and build what others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations, where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life.
But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks. It is the conviction that the unknown can be known, the confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood, and that there is a rational order to the cosmos governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand. This was the foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science, our medicine, our philosophy, ethics, and religion. It paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology, of Augustine and Aquinas, and the whole tradition of natural law.
It gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture; it was marked by a common anthropology, a common view of man and of his place in the universe. Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue, of destiny, of fate, of truth, goodness, and beauty, of a code that dictates how men ought to live, of objective standards and ideals to strive towards.
“We build downwards”
For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence. They organized all of civic life around contest and ambition and competition: in philosophy and poetry and sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle, to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.
Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd. It may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, a world devoid of risk or failure, where neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat [exists]. Too often, these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure that no one will lose. We preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.
The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction came the great flowering of art, philosophy, and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.
The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it, the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride, is the heart of great civilization. And without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.
Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness. The word nationalism became a dirty word, and so we tore down our monuments. We condemned our own history, and in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.
[...]
Heroes who do not worship death
Now it’s become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one’s own people, and I think here too we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece, because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests. Above all else, they believed fiercely in the ideal of the great man, the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds. But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing, and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself.
The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty. We see this in Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth, even at the cost of his own life. We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans, surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia, who refused a chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty. And we see it in the epic myth of Achilles, who is offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life, but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory.
These are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination, from the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life for his country, from Saint Thomas More to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, which says we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty, an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country. Our heroes, the heroes of the West, are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the proverbial captain who goes down with the ship.
This is wholly different from what we see even now, for example, from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes and portrays martyrdom as an end in itself. Our heroes, our heroes may be willing to die for their cause, but our heroes do not worship death. It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles.
Now we take the Western conception of these things, heroism, honor, duty, we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after. The civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.
From Athens to Apollo 11
The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom, who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne, and Florence. The quest to perfect the human form that moved the ancient Greek sculptors found a new expression in Michelangelo. The Greek philosophers’ search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus, then Galileo, and Kepler, and Newton. The hunger for new knowledge, that’s what gave birth to Magellan’s first expedition around the world, to Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11’s journey to the moon. And the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, and Charlemagne, and Cortés.
And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew. An open and wild land became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition. The Greek aspiration for new horizons became the American frontier spirit. The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.
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.
Together, we must now rediscover that spirit. We are at an inflection point, an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization. The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity. National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions. War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace.
Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory and technology and resources and markets and energy and power. And now there is war again. There is new competition between great powers again. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again.
[...]
An image of ourselves
You know, our friendship dates back to the earliest years of my nation. When Greece rose in 1821 to recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule, Americans recognized something familiar in that struggle. Three years later, the great American statesman Daniel Webster delivered a famous address to Congress, helping bring the cause of the Greek Revolution before the representatives of the young American Republic. And he began by calling their attention to everything around them. This is what he said in his speech:
“This free form of government, this popular assembly, this practice of free debate and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind, even the edifice in which we assemble, these proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors.”
Those words are as true today as they were when he said them. And all of us, not just Americans, but Europeans and our friends across the West, must relearn the lessons our forefathers took from this place and from its history.
The history of Greece does not just offer us a glimpse of institutions in their earliest forms. The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves. It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud, that we should be intensely proud of where we come from. We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside. The story of the civilization is the greatest story ever known to man, and it began here with the first men and women of the West. From them, we can rediscover the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.
Thank you.
Some great lines in this speech.
For parents who want to encourage thoughtful reflection with their kids...
1. List three attributes that made Greek civilization unique.
Extension: Identity one historical event that reflects each attribute.
2. List three aspects of Western civilization/America that are derived from the Greek civilization.
Extension: Trace one aspect through the centuries. How did it manifest during each time period and how did it change through the ages?
Going Further: Why do you think it changed?
3. List three key quotations from the speech and explain why you think each quotation is significant.
Extension: Choose one key quotation and explain how/to what extent it is still relevant in today's world. Refer to specific social, political, personal experiences to reinforce your stance.
4. What is the lesson the speech is trying to teach?
Extension: What is a message you would want to share with Americans if given an opportunity?
Dear Natalya,
Thank you for this post. It gave me a chance to watch Marco Rubio's speech, which I hope in the future, will be known as a turning point in history (given on the day you got false eyelashes)!
Thanks,
randy