There was something almost irresistible about the setting. Marco Rubio stood on the Pnyx in Athens, the hill where citizens of classical Athens gathered to debate the affairs of their city, and delivered a speech about the civilization that gave the West the words democracy, politics, and tyranny. He spoke warmly of Greece and described the United States as deeply indebted to its ancient inheritance. The State Department subsequently highlighted the speech, including Rubio’s argument that Western nations should recover confidence in their national identity and power.
For Greeks, much of this is flattering. For Americans, it is reassuring in its familiarity. Athens becomes the cradle of democracy; the American Founders become its heirs; the West becomes a civilizational family; and Greece becomes, as Rubio put it, a model ally. The symbolism is almost perfect. Yet precisely because the setting is the Pnyx, the speech deserves to be read more carefully than a diplomatic compliment.
Rubio's argument is not simply that Greece gave the West democracy. His larger argument is that ancient Greece also gave the West ambition, competition, courage, national loyalty, and the willingness to use force. He says that ancient Greeks understood national interests and knew that statecraft sometimes required the credible threat of force. He then connects that lesson to the Trump administration's desire to restore what he calls the “classical understanding” of politics and statecraft.
That is where history becomes politically useful — and historically dangerous.
Because ancient Athens cannot be reduced to the sentence: the strong must be willing to use power.
Athens was indeed a regional power. It coerced allies, extracted tribute, and crushed resistance. The Melian episode, described by Thucydides, remains one of the ancient world's starkest examinations of power stripped of moral decoration. The Athenians told the Melians, in essence, that justice had little meaning between unequal powers.
But if that is the Athens Rubio wants the modern West to remember, Thucydides offers another episode that is impossible to ignore.
In 427 BC, after the city of Mytilene on Lesbos revolted against Athens, the Athenians voted to punish the entire male population and enslave the women and children. A ship was dispatched carrying the order.
Then Athens changed its mind.
The next day, the citizens assembled again. The decision was debated. Diodotus argued that collective execution would serve neither justice nor Athenian interests. The assembly reversed its original decision and sent a second ship after the first, carrying the new order.
The second crew rowed desperately, taking turns sleeping and eating as they tried to catch the first vessel. According to Thucydides, they arrived just in time. The original order had been delivered, but the executions had not yet begun.
Mytilene was spared.
That episode does not make Athens innocent. But it makes the Power of Democracy more accountable, self-correcting and ultimately, more humane.
Athens could make a terrible decision. It could vote for collective punishment. It could exercise imperial power brutally. But its citizens could assemble again, reconsider the decision and reverse it before the machinery of state had completed the act.
That is what the Pnyx represents; the other Athens — the one that appears most powerfully in Pericles' Funeral Oration as recorded by Thucydides. There, Athens is presented not merely as a city that defeats enemies, but as a civic experiment: a society in which public life belongs to citizens, law matters, individuals participate in government, and courage is connected to a way of life rather than simply to military victory.
Scholars rightly recognize the tension between that idealized picture and Athens' imperialistic reality. The city that gave democracy to history was also trying to become an empire. It could speak beautifully about freedom while denying freedom to others. It could celebrate civic equality at home while exercising domination abroad.
But that contradiction is precisely the historical lesson.
Athens was not democratic because Athenians were always wise or virtuous. It was democratic because political power could be contested by citizens — sometimes even after an appalling decision had already been made.
Rubio's speech is therefore most revealing not when he praises Greece, but when he decides which Greece to remember.
He praises the Pnyx, democracy, philosophy, scientific curiosity and the Greek search for knowledge. Then he makes a sudden shift toward nationalism, military strength, technological dominance and the willingness to use force, saying that under Trump the United States has chosen “the unapologetic pursuit of national power” and lists dominance in advanced technology, drones, weapons, chips, minerals and warfare among its objectives. He later describes the United States itself as a “continental empire.”
The latter deserves scrutiny. If Athens is the source of Western political civilization, then democracy cannot be merely the cultural decoration surrounding a doctrine of power. The Pnyx was not important because Athenians knew how to threaten weaker states. It mattered because citizens gathered there and argued over what their city should do.
And sometimes they changed their minds.
That distinction matters particularly now, as the United States is fighting Iran or helping Israel in Gaza. Rubio did not need to cite Melos explicitly to make his point about force. His speech makes the argument directly: nations have interests; diplomacy has limits; credible power requires a willingness to use it.
But Greek history offers another warning. A continental power can become convinced that its power is evidence of its virtue. That is not uniquely American, and it was not uniquely Athenian. It is one of the oldest political temptations known to humanity. The Persian King Xerxes understood power as an instrument of imperial will until the waters of Salamis demonstrated that power, too, has limits.
But the most important lesson may be smaller than Salamis, and more democratic than any battlefield. A city was about to kill thousands of people because its citizens had voted to do so. Then its citizens voted again. And a second ship raced across the Aegean to stop the first.
That is not a story about weakness, but about political power being capable of correction.
It is also why invoking Athens while arguing for national power requires intellectual honesty. Athens gives the West two histories at once: the history of imperial power and the history of citizen government. One tells us what a powerful state can do to the weak. The other asks who gets to decide what the powerful state does.
The difference is not academic, Mr. Rubio.
When a government exercises enormous military power, the crucial democratic question is not simply whether the nation has sufficient strength to impose its will. It is whether citizens retain meaningful authority over the decisions made in their name — including the ability to say no, to reconsider and, when necessary, to reverse course.
Rubio came to the Pnyx to tell the West that it should rediscover the Greek fire — ambition, courage, excellence, power and national purpose. But he should have listened more closely to the place where he was standing. The great achievement of Athens was not that it discovered how to make the strong stronger. It was that, for a brief and imperfect moment in human history, ordinary citizens were invited to decide together what power should be used for — and, in the case of Mytilene, were able to change their minds before it was too late. That is a very different inheritance from a simple doctrine of power.
And if Washington wants to invoke Athens while exercising military power abroad, perhaps the most important Greek question is not whether America is powerful enough to impose its will. It is whether American power still answers to the citizens in whose name it is exercised.
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