Historical Significance of the Acropolis

places. They are places where history seems to

have exhausted itself,

remnants of, uh, distant cultures

that have long passed beyond, beyond a living memory.

But the Acropolis is different.

For thousands of years,

the civilization that built what stands behind me has

captivated

the imagination of the Western world.

Generations of our statesmen, artists, and philosophers

have looked at to it-- They've looked to it with wonder

and they've looked to it with awe.

Now, time

has a tendency to dull the senses. Great victories and catastrophic

defeats, they, they seem to shrink to becoming like a

footnote

in a textbook,

another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget.

But the Greeks of antiquity,

they seem to 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. They burned the shrines.

They 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 twenty-five 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,

I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that republic and as the

great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the New World from Spain.

I stand here to testify to a debt

that no lapse of time,

no distance of space

can ever extinguish.

The history of America,

the history of my country,

is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity.

Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our

government, in the towering columns, in the domes and the

monuments across our capital city.

The city where our Constitution was born, Philadelphia, is-