They had obviously worked hard on the backdrop – and it was magnificent. On 7 October, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, delivered a major speech in Athens, outdoors, with the Acropolis behind him. The sun was setting, bathing the ancient scene, including the Parthenon, in the light of the golden hour.

The golden hour, but yet not quite the golden age. This was not Pericles defending democracy. Instead, Rubio offered a haunting vision of the choices facing the west, arguing that the US and Europe must rediscover the values of exploration and conquest that once drove centuries of expansion, or face decline and irrelevance.

For long stretches, it was an exercise in nostalgia, lamenting the decline of western civilization as if this were a seminar at Hillsdale College or the Claremont Institute.

In fact, a freshman seminar would have been able to puncture most of the speech’s assumptions. It’s true that the founders read deeply in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, but they went there to justify their hope to build a democracy of equals – not a civilization of conquest.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, admitted his debt to Cicero, who wrote: “Citizens of the same republic ought to have equal rights.” Abraham Lincoln considered the Greek mathematician Euclid a major influence, precisely because he defined equality as an inviolable concept.

And what exactly is “the west”? We have a vague idea, but the question becomes complicated in the details. Is Vladimir Putin invited to this party? Russians also feel that their history stems from Greece and Rome. How about Adolf Hitler?

Few leaders loved Rome and Greece more, as he made clear at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In Mein Kampf, he celebrated the “higher culture” that arose from “the hardships of the Persian War”, in lines that might........

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