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Europe’s intellectual debt to Arabic scholarship, Athens’s excluded majority and the coercion behind imperial expansion expose the omissions in Rubio’s civilisational sermon.
A substantial part of the Greek philosophy, medicine and science that shaped medieval Europe reached it through scholars working in Arabic. They translated it, challenged it and developed it. That history alone punctures the self-contained Western inheritance Marco Rubio presented in Athens.
His speech manufactures a usable past: a history in which the West’s achievements establish its exceptional character, while the contributions of outsiders and the experiences of its victims largely disappear.
Three facts expose the weakness of that account.
First, Western intellectual achievement was never an exclusively Western creation. Greek learning passed through Christian, Muslim and Jewish scholars; Arabic philosophy and science supplied original advances that European thinkers absorbed. Baghdad, Córdoba and Toledo belong in this history alongside Athens and Rome. Byzantium’s independent contribution strengthens the case for interconnected development: no single civilisation owned the inheritance.
Second, ancient Athens denied political power to most of the people who sustained it. Women could not participate in the assembly. Resident foreigners were excluded. Enslaved people were property. One reconstruction places politically eligible adult male citizens at roughly a tenth of the population. That estimate is uncertain; the exclusions are not. A political order that permitted some men to govern while allowing them to own other human beings cannot stand unqualified as an embodiment of modern democratic equality.
Third, Western power grew through conquest and exploitation as well as invention and enterprise. Indigenous dispossession made territory available to settlers. Enslaved labour produced commodities and wealth. Imperial force secured revenues, resources and commercial access. Scientific achievement does not erase those mechanisms, and military success does not establish moral superiority.
These are not incidental blemishes on an otherwise complete account. They change its meaning.
Recognise the intellectual debts, and Western civilisation becomes a history of exchange. Restore the excluded majority, and Athenian freedom becomes a question of who possessed it and at whose expense. Include the conquered, and imperial expansion ceases to be merely an exhibition of courage.
Rubio is entitled to admire Greece. He is not entitled to turn admiration into an adequate explanation of the modern world.
At the Pnyx on 7 October, Rubio credited Athens with the first full realisation of “all the essential traits that would come to define the West”. He contrasted Greek curiosity with societies he characterised as inward-looking and preoccupied with stability and subsistence: “Where others looked inward”. [1]
Here admiration becomes a theory of civilisational difference. Rubio does not explicitly deny Arabic contributions or claim that Athenian women voted. His argument is broader: a distinctive ancient character explains Western achievement, and recovering that character offers a remedy for decline. The objection is to that explanatory leap. Evidence of influence cannot, by itself, establish an enduring civilisational personality.
A speech need not mention every culture. But when it attributes exceptional achievement to inherited qualities, the people through whom knowledge travelled become central to testing its claim.
The scholars between Athens and Europe
In ninth-century Baghdad, Hunayn ibn Ishaq faced a problem familiar to anyone trying to recover an old text: copies disagreed, passages were corrupt, and a translation could reproduce an earlier translator’s mistake.
Hunayn, a Christian physician working in Syriac and Arabic, compared manuscripts and revised translations. His work on Galen required medical understanding as well as linguistic skill. Uwe Vagelpohl’s studies show him assessing texts and helping readers negotiate their difficulties. Some Greek medical writing survives through Arabic transmission when its Greek original has been lost. [2]
This was intellectual labour within the Abbasid world. Muslim political patronage, Christian scholarly networks and Greek texts met in an enterprise sustained by physicians, officials and other patrons. The categories that appear separate in civilisational speeches were already entangled in the work itself.
Translation also created the conditions for disagreement. Once Greek arguments could be studied in Arabic, they could be tested, reorganised and challenged. The recipient was not obliged to remain the pupil.
Avicenna illustrates what followed. Born in Central Asia in the tenth century, he constructed a philosophical system whose treatment of existence, causation and the soul became central to subsequent debate. When his writings reached Latin readers, they encountered an author making arguments of his own, not simply a substitute copy of Aristotle. [3]
His medical Canon supplies a particularly concrete measure of that influence. It entered European university teaching, with its use documented at Montpellier and Paris in the fourteenth century. Its authority continued into the Renaissance. Generations of European medical students worked within a curriculum substantially shaped by a scholar writing in Arabic. [4]
That does not make the Canon modern medicine, or establish that all its doctrines were correct. It establishes something more relevant here: European intellectual development depended on sustained engagement with knowledge produced outside the ancestry Rubio celebrates.
The journey into Latin was itself collaborative. In twelfth-century Toledo, translators worked with Arabic manuscripts and scholars from different religious backgrounds. Avicenna’s account of the soul reached Latin through the collaboration of Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Jewish scholar Avendauth. Sicily and southern Italy provided further routes. European scholars received questions and interpretations alongside the ancient texts. [3]
The third example concerns something as ordinary, and as difficult to explain, as seeing.
Ibn al-Haytham subjected vision to geometrical and physical investigation, using observation and testing to reconsider earlier theories. His work transformed inherited optics. Its Latin reception helped shape the investigations of Roger Bacon, Witelo and John Pecham. This was an active research tradition crossing languages, not a library returning borrowed books. [5]
Around these three examples stand a wider intellectual world: al-Kindi and al-Farabi developing philosophy in Arabic; Averroes interpreting Aristotle and disputing Avicenna; al-Khwarizmi organising algebraic knowledge and transmitting Indian reckoning; Maimonides composing his major philosophical work in Arabic. Their differences matter. Arabic was a scholarly language shared by Muslims, Christians and Jews, not a certificate of religious identity. [3,6]
Byzantium, meanwhile, maintained its own Greek manuscript and philosophical traditions, and direct Greek-to-Latin translation supplied another major channel. No defensible account makes Arabic scholarship Europe’s exclusive route to antiquity. These parallel routes strengthen the explanation through exchange: European readers inherited scholarship already transformed by successive communities of thinkers. [7]
That history explains how books, arguments and methods became available. It does not automatically explain equal citizenship. For that, the political institutions themselves must be examined.
Freedom inside the boundary
An Athenian citizen could exercise authority in the assembly while exercising ownership over another human being. The first relationship expressed civic equality; the second denied it. Both belonged to the same political society.
The citizen’s power was substantial. Poor male citizens participated in decisions, served in popular courts and could hold offices allocated by lot. Payments for civic service helped make participation practicable. Wealth influenced leadership without reserving government entirely to the wealthy. This was a restricted citizen democracy, not simply an oligarchy of rich men. [8]
Outside that citizen body stood the people whose exclusion made its equality particular rather than universal. Women could transmit the qualifying descent on which citizenship depended but could not participate in the assembly. Resident foreigners remained outside the franchise. Enslaved people lacked the political standing of their owners.
The estimate mentioned above concerns the population of Attica, including children, rather than the proportion of adults entitled to vote. It depends especially on disputed reconstructions of the enslaved and foreign populations. The exclusion of those groups, however, is documented independently of their precise numbers. [8–9]
Slavery entered the household, the workshop and the mines. Its extent in agriculture remains disputed, and many citizens worked for their living. The importance of enslaved labour should not be inflated into a picture of every citizen enjoying leisure at somebody else’s expense. [10]
Yet the economic relationship could be brutally explicit. In Ways and Means, Xenophon discussed income from leasing enslaved workers in the silver mines and proposed public ownership of slaves as a source of revenue. His proposal is not evidence that the scheme was implemented. It is evidence that financing the community through ownership of people could be presented as practical public policy. [11]
Aristotle supplied an intellectual defence of a related hierarchy. Book I of the Politics argues that some people are naturally fitted for enslavement, while distinguishing that proposition from the claim that every captive taken in war is justly enslaved. A political tradition committed to equal human standing must reject the underlying hierarchy, not merely inherit it. [12]
Rubio’s statement “Athens gave us democracy” identifies a genuine institutional ancestry. The difficulty begins when that ancestry is made to stand for the moral character of the civilisation that followed. Modern equality required changing who could count as a political equal. Ancient precedent could offer resources for that struggle; it could also supply arguments against it.
The boundary also ran between Athens and other communities. Thucydides records that, after Melos surrendered in 416 BCE, the Athenians killed the adult men they captured, enslaved the women and children, and subsequently settled colonists there. His Melian Dialogue is a literary presentation of the confrontation, not a verbatim transcript. Its enduring question is whether a powerful state recognises another community’s freedom when that freedom obstructs its interests. Self-government at home did not prevent domination abroad. [28]
How power became wealth
The same distinction between ancestry and justification matters when conquest enters the story. Rubio connects Alexander with Caesar, Charlemagne and Cortés, then presents American territorial expansion as another expression of inherited ambition. His frontier begins with “an open and wild land”. [1]
The missing question is how land became available, labour became controllable and commerce became profitable. Four mechanisms make the answer clearer than a procession of celebrated conquerors.
First, dispossession transferred control of territory. Andrew Jackson’s message to Congress in December 1830 linked Indigenous removal to the growth, wealth and power of expanding American states. Here the official record supplies the connection: removing existing inhabitants created opportunities for settlers and strengthened the states claiming their land. The subsequent Cherokee removal involved government coercion, not simply the movement of adventurous families towards an unoccupied horizon. [13]
Conquered peoples were also political actors. Cortés depended on Indigenous allies pursuing their own interests against Mexica power. Their participation helps explain the conquest without turning its outcome into proof of European superiority. It also defeats the equally misleading picture of passive populations waiting for history to happen to them. [14]
Second, enslavement compelled labour and generated commodities. Plantation production connected the violence of ownership to markets in sugar and other goods, and to the merchants and industries servicing that trade. Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery made those connections central to its explanation of British economic development. The plantation belonged within a commercial system extending far beyond the fields. [15]
The records of abolition expose the property interests embedded in that system. Under the British settlement following the 1833 legislation, Parliament allocated £20 million to compensate slave owners. The people who had been owned received no corresponding compensation. UCL’s research traces the beneficiaries and their connections with metropolitan society. Freedom was negotiated through institutions that recognised the owners’ financial claims. [16]
Third, colonial government commanded revenues. The East India Company’s acquisition of revenue-collecting authority in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1765 joined commercial power to fiscal rule. A company able to command revenues occupied a fundamentally different position from a merchant obliged merely to persuade customers to buy. The grant is recorded in the Company’s own correspondence. [17]
Fourth, military force could impose commercial access. Britain’s First Opium War against China demonstrates the relationship between armed power and trade. Commercial interests did not operate in a neutral marketplace: military victory changed the conditions under which trade took place. [18]
These mechanisms explain why Marx placed state coercion inside his account of capital formation. Force could establish the conditions in which private accumulation proceeded. One need not accept his entire theory to investigate the connections between conquest, monopoly and economic advantage. [19]
The other side of those relationships matters equally. Walter Rodney asked how the extraction benefiting metropolitan economies affected African development. His analysis followed both monetary transfers and the technological and organisational advantages accruing to the colonisers. It directs attention to choices an imperial system constrained: what could be produced, who controlled its sale, and whose purposes infrastructure served. [20]
Rodney’s interpretation and Williams’s account are arguments to test, not a collective verdict on every Western economy. The scale of slavery’s contribution to industrialisation remains contested. Joel Mokyr emphasises skilled artisans and the capacity to make inventions work; Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson examine how slavery and Atlantic commerce stimulated demand and skills; Robert Allen gives high wages and cheap energy a central role while also considering trade and empire. [21]
Those explanations need not be reduced to a choice between invention and exploitation. Institutions could foster ingenuity while protecting coerced production. An expanding market could reward technical improvements while depending on unequal political power. The question is how these processes interacted, not which one permits the most flattering account.
Nor were slavery and empire exclusively Western institutions. Their wider existence makes civilisational innocence an implausible starting point anywhere. It does not remove the obligation to explain the particular conquests through which European and American power expanded.
The rights that had to be fought for
Modern freedom presents a further difficulty for a history organised around the recovery of ancestral character. Many of its defining extensions were demanded by people whom established institutions refused to recognise as equals.
The abolition movement was not simply a benevolent civilisation correcting a distant abuse. Black campaigners, including Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, worked alongside white abolitionists; Mary Prince’s account brought the experience of enslavement before British readers. Enslaved people themselves resisted the system. Parliamentary action, religious organising, public campaigning and resistance in the colonies formed interacting sources of pressure. No single group can claim emancipation as its exclusive achievement. [22]
Abolition also required confronting recognised property rights and powerful economic interests. The compensation settlement shows how deeply those interests shaped the transition. Celebrating freedom without examining the struggle against its opponents turns a political victory into an apparently automatic expression of national virtue.
Working people confronted another boundary. After the 1832 Reform Act left most of them without the vote, the Chartists demanded male suffrage, secret ballots, payment of MPs and the removal of parliamentary property qualifications. Their petitions were rejected. They sought to alter who could exercise power, not merely to express pride in the constitution already governing them. [23]
Their programme was itself limited: universal manhood suffrage was not universal adult suffrage. That limitation helps explain why progress cannot be presented as a single moment when an entire civilisation discovered freedom. Each extension exposed exclusions that earlier reformers had left intact.
Women’s suffrage makes the conflict still clearer. Campaigns challenged institutions that treated political authority as male. Some imprisoned suffragettes undertook hunger strikes and were force-fed. Constitutional campaigning, militancy, party politics and the disruption of war all belong in the explanation; the result cannot be assigned to one tactic. [24]
The 1918 settlement enfranchised virtually all men over 21 but only women over 30 meeting specified qualifications. Equal parliamentary voting terms followed in 1928. The legal changes were recent achievements measured against the centuries during which women had been excluded. They were not ancient rights waiting undisturbed beneath a layer of national self-doubt. [25]
The struggle over political equality also crossed imperial borders. In December 1960, the United Nations adopted its declaration on colonial independence from a draft sponsored by 43 Asian and African countries. The adopted text affirmed self-determination and rejected colonial subjection. Britain and the United States were among nine abstaining states; 89 voted in favour and none against. [26]
The significance extends beyond the vote. African and Asian states helped formulate an international principle against a system under which powerful European states had denied others control of their political future. They were participants in the making of the modern order, not merely recipients of values handed down by former rulers.
National independence does not itself guarantee individual freedom. That distinction requires examining the rights being claimed, rather than assigning their authorship to a single civilisation.
Rubio himself has recognised that American predominance is historically contingent. In his interview with Megyn Kelly on 30 January 2025, he described post-Cold War unipolarity as an anomaly and acknowledged a world of several great powers. In Athens, he presented preserving the West’s leading position as the alternative to decline and subordination. These positions are not logically incompatible: a state can recognise competitors while seeking primacy. But the contrast raises a question his historical pageant cannot answer. Why should sharing power signify civilisational failure rather than adjustment to the world he has already described? [1,29]
Industrial dependence and inadequate defence capacity can create real vulnerabilities. Losing exclusive predominance is a different matter. Neither establishes that shame about the past caused the problem.
The historical objection is narrower, and stronger, than an accusation that he invented every fact. He assembles selected achievements into a genealogy of Western greatness, then asks that genealogy to explain present obligations. What falls outside it includes some of the people who enlarged the very freedoms now presented as an inheritance.
Abolitionists challenged owners. Workers challenged political exclusion. Women challenged male authority. Anticolonial movements challenged foreign rule. Their victories often required forcing institutions to honour principles they proclaimed selectively, or to accept principles they had previously resisted.
The West’s history contains those struggles as surely as it contains its monuments. Treating criticism as a loss of civilisational confidence mistakes one of the means by which freedom expanded for a threat to freedom itself.
The question Rubio’s speech leaves unanswered is therefore not whether the past deserves admiration. It is whether we admire only those who accumulated power, or also those who compelled power to answer to the people it excluded.