If you want to know something about America, look to Greece.
If you want to know something about America, look to Greece.
M arco Rubio’s speech last week in front of the Acropolis reminded conservatives one cannot conserve anything meaningful without remembrance and tradition. When conservatives forget, they become something other than conservatives.
“Athens gave us democracy,” the secretary of state reminded those gathered. “Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, of virtue, of 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.”
Rubio pointed out that The Federalist Papers cited Plutarch more than any other author, the very city where the founders gathered to craft the Declaration and Constitution took its name from Greek words, and America’s capital cribs its architecture (okay, so maybe we cannot “credit” the Greeks for Department of Health and Human Services’s Hubert H. Humphrey Building) from these Hellenic forebears. In other words, if you want to know something about America, know something about Athens.
Such an interest in antiquity stated in a public speech, astounding for a conservative politician operating in the age of Truth Social, strikes as pedestrian for the conservative intellectuals involved in this magazine more than six decades ago. The invocation of Ancient Greece by National Review contributor Stephen Tonsor in an epistolary discussion with magazine senior editor Frank S. Meyer comes to mind. It offered one preemptive addendum, if such a thing exists, to Rubio’s speech.
The University of Michigan history professor, who elsewhere confessed a dislike for Meyer’s preferred telephonic means of communication, wrote him 65 years ago yesterday:
Lecturing in the historiography course the thought struck me as to how contemporary the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides really is. I know that men are always finding Thucydides contemporary; this is a commonplace of being a classic. But the intensity of the dialogue is something special. The Athenian appeal to naked power, a power which is both revolutionary and amoral is quite like the behavior of the Russians. Their arguments are strikingly like those employed by the Russians in the current Berlin crisis. To those who say that the threat of atomic destruction lends a new dimension to our discussion of an appeal to arms the Melian dialogue is particularly instructive. The Melians made this appeal and were willing to see the destruction, total destruction of their society in the name of freedom.
Meyer described himself as “moved” by Tonsor’s letter. “Having had a good deal of experience speaking at Universities in the past few months and coming up against the nuclear surrender mentality,” he wrote after recent dates at Bowdoin, American, the University of Chicago, and points beyond, “I agree with you that — despite the corny references to Thucydides — it is both powerful and apposite.”
Of course, the Athenians ultimately exterminated the men of Melos and enslaved their women and children. The vanquished personified the slogan found 2,500 years later on license plates in New Hampshire — “Live Free or Die.” And the Athenians? Here their course veered from the traditions bequeathed to the Americans that Marco Rubio extols. The notion of “right,” as Thucydides quotes the imperialists as telling the outnumbered islanders, “is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
We did not blindly take everything from the Athenians. Not a foreign policy colored by monomaniacal self-interest, but one instead that required interest plus justice as the essential criteria generally characterized the outlook of men such as Meyer and Tonsor.
The secretary of state, in making a broad point about the foolishness of a subservience of national interests to the “global community” (can there be a community of everybody?), surely elicits huzzahs from conservatives then and now. But one of the best speeches by an American politician in some time nevertheless omits something important by citing Ancient Greece to buttress the notion of “nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else.”
The heroic yet enslaved and exterminated people of Melos might beg to differ.