Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently gave a speech in Athens. He gave it in the Pnyx, where ancient Athenians met to practice their version of democracy, with the Acropolis prominently in the background. Rubio’s goal was to hold up the Greeks as manly models to rejuvenate our decadent present, but he succeeded mostly in displaying his own ignorance and corruption.
Rubio, not known heretofore for his deep interest in the classics, invoked what he thinks are the close ties between America and the ancient Greeks. He says some fine things about what we owe to Athens and to Greek civilization more generally: outstanding works of literature, philosophy, mathematics, and science. The first historians. Democracy. He rightfully says that Western civilization would be unthinkable without the Greek contribution.
Rubio used the Greeks to argue for a particular set of virtues that he thinks Americans and especially Europeans have lost. These include self-confidence, individualism, heroism, innovation, sacrifice, and the use of force to defend our way of life. Once upon a time these defined the West but—for reasons Rubio fails to explain—they have weakened, and today we are floundering, not spending enough on defense, overwhelmed by immigrants, deferring to multinational organizations. The Trump administration is turning things around in America, but Europe remains at risk and needs to step up.
Rubio invokes a Greek term to sum up what the Greeks had and we supposedly don’t: thumos, often translated as ‘spiritedness.’ Thumos is a concept that incorporates pride, honor, courage, and self-respect; but also aggression, selfishness, and the desire for power. It is not an unalloyed good, but as Plato and the Greek tragedians consider at length, a part of human nature that is necessary but must be properly controlled.
What happens when thumos is not controlled is described by another Greek word that Rubio should have used but didn’t: hubris, excessive pride and self-confidence. Hubris is a permanent danger in human affairs, especially for people and regimes that have gained power and wealth.
It is characteristic of the Greeks that they could acknowledge and describe their own failings. It was hubris that Thucydides tells us brings down classical Athens. Athens was the wealthiest and strongest of the Greek city-states. It had been at the forefront of the coalition that defeated Persia, and went on to build an empire that rested on its powerful navy. But Athens alienated its allies with ever-increasing demands for tribute, punished neutrals who refused to align with Athens against Sparta, and followed the call of an ambitious populist, Alcibiades, to mount an invasion of Sicily that swallowed its resources and ended in disaster. Sound familiar?
Rubio tries to surprise us by pointing out that the writer most often cited in the Federalist Papers is Plutarch, a Greek who wrote his famous Lives comparing notable Greeks and Romans. Many of our founders were well acquainted with the classics. This knowledge served them well, but the inference that the Greeks were a model for America is false.
Rubio would have been on firmer ground if he read what Alexander Hamilton has to say in Federalist #9: “It is impossible to read the history of the petty Republics of Greece and Italy, without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions, by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration, between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.”
Rubio is right that the founders learned from the Greeks, but what to avoid, not to emulate. The Greeks failed to moderate their thumos and ended up squandering their collective strength in endless wars and internal divisions. This made them vulnerable to foreign domination, first by the Macedonians, then the Romans. The challenge for the authors of the Federalist Papers was to devise a system that kept in check the famous Greek agonistic spirit and directed it to productive ends. Hence the careful construction of constitutional checks and balances so that, as James Madison says in Federalist 51, ‘ambition must be made to counter ambition.’
Rubio, like many conservatives, bemoans what he sees as a loss of Western confidence: “Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional.” Self-criticism can indeed go too far. But it is hard to look at 20th and 21st century history and think the ‘West’ suffers from a shortage of thumos. Our challenge has not been to revive our flagging animal spirits, but how to keep aggression and the lust for power from destroying civilization.
Until recently this was a task that America embraced, and the rationale for the complex of international organizations and alliances America helped construct after World War II and reinforced after the collapse of communism. Trump has dedicated himself to trashing these institutions and convincing Americans that international relations have nothing to do with principles but only with ‘who has the cards.’ This dumbed-down realpolitik is exactly what took down Athens. Under Trump we are moving quickly down the same path.
Despite its meaningful commitments to multilateralism and peaceful conflict resolution, the United States has frequently fallen prey to hubris with deeply damaging, Sicily-reminiscent adventures in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran. These have all been justified as necessary unilateral uses of force by the world’s ‘indispensable power.’
Rubio himself was until recently a firm supporter of America’s alliances and its leading role in supporting democracy and freedom around the world. He hopes that spouting off about the Greeks will make us forget how he abandoned his principles to gain power, and position himself for the Presidency in 2028. Disguising self-interest as virtue is how dictators everywhere gain popular support.
Rubio serves a President and a movement that prey on fears of weakness to exalt performative displays of testosterone and toughness. Its model of strength is the playground bully, talking trash and trying to steal the lunch money of the smaller kids—Venezuela, Greenland, Canada— while carefully staying on the good side of anyone who might actually fight back, like China or Russia.
Rubio wants to dress this up as a noble return to our Greek heritage, with the Greeks redefined as Hegsethian warriors whose only thought is to fight to the death for national pride. This is an insult to the memory of Greece and to every citizen of the world who ever thrilled to Homer, wept with Antigone, was inspired by Socrates, learned from Thucydides.
A modern thinker who has thought deeply about thumos is Francis Fukuyama. In The End of History and the Last Man he talks extensively about two ways thumos can manifest itself: isothymia, or the desire for equal recognition and dignity; and megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as superior. The first is a powerful force in liberal society where it drives demands for equality of rights and conditions. It can be seen in modern movements for women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, and equal access for the handicapped.
Fukuyama thinks zeal for isothymia can go too far in trying to correct all differences due to nature or culture, but he is more worried about an excess of megalothymia: “It is my intuition that it is the former [megalothymia] that will constitute the greater threat to democracy in the end.” The desire to be the best, the richest, the most powerful, cannot be eradicated.
Fukuyama thinks it can be directed under modern capitalism into largely beneficial forms of economic competition. In traditional societies like ancient Greece, war and politics were the only outlets for ambition: “It is no wonder that the ambitious Alcibiades went into politics where…he invaded Sicily and brought destruction on the Athenian state.”
However, the successful rich are always hard to contain. They will not stay in their lane; without substantial legal and political constraints, their wealth leads to the undue political and social influence of the Musks, Zuckerbergs, Bloombergs, Thiels, and other billionaires. Elon Musk alone has given more money to support Trump in the midterm elections than any other donor, and more than he gave in the entire 2024 presidential race, according to the New York Times.
Rubio and Trump’s hysterical attacks on isothymia for weakening Western civilization are intended to divert our attention from the economic megalothymia that is the basis of their political power. Even when this threatens to destroy democracy, the environment, or, with AI, the entire human race, there is little willingness to countenance regulations or guardrails. Today’s wealthy techlords have become unabashed promoters of an anti-democratic creed that exalts the right to rule of the very rich. (Another Greek concept Rubio should have incorporated is pleonexia, or greed, a vice that threatens to consume the soul in an endless pursuit of wealth and power and is strongly condemned by Plato and other Greek thinkers).
Rubio’s speech is the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s campaign of Europe-scolding. JD Vance and Rubio have given a number of speeches with the same message: Europe should spend more on defense, be more aggressive about immigration, stop discriminating against right-wing parties, stop regulating online speech. Europe in short should be more like Trump’s America. The heart of the argument is that Europe and America should man the barricades together in defense of Christendom against woke atheistic socialism, enabled by victories for Europe’s far-right political parties.
The lack of concern about the linked desires for wealth and power underscores one of the failings of Rubio’s Athens speech: its cynical distortion of Christianity. Nothing could be clearer than the Christian condemnation of an excessive focus on worldly things.
Here is Rubio’s childish attempt to assert that the Greek and Roman virtues he admires blend easily with Christianity: “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.”
What is Christianity if not a rebuke to all those Greek elements Rubio wants us to embrace: “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 and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.” We may greatly admire these things, but they are at odds with the teachings of the Bible and of Christianity. They are at the heart of human pride, the sin of sins.
The story of the intertwining of Greece and Jerusalem is long and complex; it amounts to the entire history of the West. The successes of this civilization, very much including America, come when the energy and ambition of thumos is tempered by a recognition of limits and moral boundaries; when our natural tendencies to megalothymia and the worship of success and ‘great men’ meet a teaching that “all men are created equal.”
There are people on the right, in the ‘national conservatism’ camp, who genuinely believe Trump is our last line of defense against the decline of the West. (One of them probably drafted the speech). Rubio, the consummate opportunist, is not one of them. His real aim is to gaslight us, and the people of Europe, into excusing the Trump administration’s assaults on democracy, the rule of law, and common decency, and above all its “unapologetic pursuit of national power.” This is possible if we can be fooled into thinking they are grounded in the traditions of classical Greece and Christianity, traditions that retain great authority and power. Trump and the MAGA movement embody a rejection of all that is best in both traditions. Do not be fooled.