Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman answers Rubio’s Acropolis speech: it “deliberately omits” the other half of the Greek legacy

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei responded at length to the speech US Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave on October 7 in Athens, from the Pnyx with the Acropolis as a backdrop. In a post on X on October 8, Baghaei accuses Rubio of “(mis)presenting the history of the West – from ancient Greece to the contemporary United States – as a single, seamless continuum”.

“This is the logic of anachronism: a distortion of historical time produced by the careless fusion of categories such as Greece, Rome, Christianity, Europe, America, and, ultimately, ‘America First’,” the Iranian diplomat writes.

What Rubio said about thumos and Iran

In his speech, which was devoted to the defense of Western civilization, Rubio invoked the ancient Greek concept of “thumos”, which he described as “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” at “the heart of great civilization”, according to JNS. He said the United States chooses “the unapologetic pursuit of national power”, a line reported by the Dallas Express.

Rubio also referred directly to Iran. Speaking of the sense of duty and heroism that, as he put it, the West inherited from the Greeks, he contrasted it with “the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself”. His heroes, he said, may be willing to die for their cause, but “our heroes do not worship death”.

Thucydides, Antigone and hubris

Baghaei argues that Rubio lifts the Greek concept of thumos “out of its historical and philosophical setting and recasts it as a celebration of power – of force exercised without law or justice – along with competition and national will”. That reading, he writes, “misses a constitutive half of the Greek inheritance”. Greece “was not only a theater of power and glory”, he says. “It was also the birthplace of the tragedy of hubris and aggression, from the myth of Troy and Homer’s Iliad; of the critique of imperial ambition in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War; of political philosophy in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics; and of enduring meditations on the limits of power, moral responsibility, and human fate in Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus Rex.”

“This other half of the Greek legacy is deliberately omitted from Rubio’s narrative,” Baghaei writes. In his view, history is thereby “converted from a field of inquiry and critical reflection into an instrument of political legitimation”, and what emerges is “a manufactured narrative designed to authorize U.S. militancy and to construct a convenient political myth”.

As a counter-image, Baghaei cites the painting “The Apotheosis of War” by the Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin, whose pyramid of skulls left behind by conquerors, he writes, “confronts the mythology of glory with the material residue of conquest”.

Closing his post, he calls on “Western thinkers” to defend history itself and “the philosophical complexity of Western civilization” against “a distorted and apologetic reinterpretation by an aggressive power”. “The danger lies not merely in misreading the past, but in appropriating it to authorize that force, and to aggrandize it, in the present,” he concludes.

Tehran’s reply comes while the US-Iran war continues and after Rubio’s visit to Athens, which included the sixth Greece-US Strategic Dialogue, highlighted Greece’s strategic importance to the United States in defense and energy. The choice of the Pnyx and the Acropolis as the setting gave the speech a symbolic weight that Iranian diplomacy is now publicly contesting.