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Victor Davis Hanson: Rubio’s Athens Speech Could Solve the West’s Identity Crisis

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: Did you see [Marco] Rubio’s speech in front of the Parthenon, and what are your thoughts on it?  

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it was given on the Pnyx, P-N-Y-X in English, and that’s where the Athenian demos met maybe twice a month, the ecclesia. And it holds about 8,000 people, and the seats are carved into the rock, and then there’s something called the bema where the speaker would address them, and they would look up at the Acropolis, and they could—I should say at the Parthenon—et cetera.  

You saw that shot. It was deliberate. So he was taking the stance of Pericles when he, in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, gave the famous funeral oration. So I don’t know who wrote it. I’ve heard different people contributed to it. It was very good, I thought.  

The only thing that was startling was the emphasis on thumos. Thumos, T-H-U-M-O-S. We get the thymus gland from it, thymus, and it refers in the Homeric sense. Homeric heroes have something that swells up in them. It’s larger than life.  

You know, it’s… I think we would call it manic depression or something, but you feel like you’re enthusiastic. That’s another word for en theos, the God is in you, and it makes you be larger than life. You have a great idea.

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It may be what Elon Musk had at one point when he envisioned SpaceX or Tesla, or maybe it’s what [Thomas] Edison did when he wanted to electrify the United States, or maybe it was what Alexander Graham Bell had, or maybe it was what [Gen. Ulysses S.] Grant had at Shiloh when he said, “Lick ’em tomorrow,” even though he had been defeated and humiliated on day one.  

So you can’t define it, but it’s often in a martial context.  

And the other thing about it is it’s an early Greek manifestation. It appears mostly in Homer. It’s used in the classical period, but it’s in different contexts.  

So my point is they were almost telling people, I don’t know if they meant it or not, that we’re all going to be Homeric heroes on the battlefield of Troy,........

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