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-Land of the Free

Marco Rubio: We must fight to defend Western Civilization

2026-10-08

[NYP] The Greeks of antiquity have an almost mystical hold on our memory. They call us back to them again and again.

Four-hundred-and-eighty years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city, and they put its sanctuaries to the torch. Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island. But there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home. So instead they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders and holding the greatest empire of that age at bay. For days. They were eventually overwhelmed.

The Persians plundered the temples, burned the shrines and razed the Acropolis to the ground. But when the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood, and decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon.

For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood. Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow, and the progeny of the men who built it, the sons of Athens and Rome, have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the earth — two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic, halfway across the world from where I stand now.

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