Marco Rubio delivered his speech on the revival of the Western spirit today from the Pnyx, the hill in Athens where the ...

Marco Rubio delivered his speech on the revival of the Western spirit today from the Pnyx, the hill in Athens where the assembly of ancient Athenian citizens gathered from the reforms of Cleisthenes around 507 BC until the late 4th century BC. Wars were declared, taxes were levied, and laws were voted on from this same ground. The site was sacred to Zeus, both as protector of the Athenian constitution and as a healing god, and it held a great Altar of Zeus Agoraios. The history of the place is staggering. It was from the Pnyx that Themistocles announced the naval preparations against the Persians in the 5th century BC, setting in motion the decisions that led to the Battle of Salamis, the battle that saved Greek and Western civilization from Persian conquest. Aristides spoke here to call the Greeks into a united postwar alliance. In 430 BC, Pericles delivered his famous Funeral Oration from this hill, a speech recorded by Thucydides in which he argued that for the brave, the humiliation of cowardice is worse than a noble and unexpected death. Alcibiades argued for the Sicilian expedition here. Demosthenes and Aeschines clashed here over the Macedonian question. The Pnyx did not fall silent in ancient times. On October 7 and 8, 1838, exactly 188 years ago this week, General Theodoros Kolokotronis stood on this same hill and urged Greeks to hold fast to their Orthodox faith, their education, and their freedom. He reminded them that the ancient Greeks had fallen to Rome and to barbarians only because of internal discord, and he called on the liberated Greek nation to build on concord, religion, and prudent freedom. Rubio, speaking as U.S. Secretary of State on his first official visit to Greece, called on Americans and Europeans to join what the State Department described as a great renewal of the Western spirit, tracing that heritage from Athens and Rome through the European Christian tradition to the founding of the American Republic. His visit also covered the sixth round of the Greece-United States Strategic Dialogue with Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis, covering defense cooperation, Greece's F-35 acquisition, the Souda Bay naval base, and Greece's ...