Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei has slammed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio for what he described as a distorted reading of Western history, accusing him of selectively invoking ancient Greece to legitimize an “America First” foreign policy and justify the use of force.

In a post on his X account on Thursday, Baqaei said Rubio, speaking against the backdrop of the Acropolis in Athens earlier in the day, presented Western history “from ancient Greece to the contemporary United States” as a “single, seamless continuum,” using what he called anachronistic historical parallels to recast American power and intimidation in the language of philosophy and history.

“At the Acropolis, Marco Rubio (mis)presents the history of the West - from ancient Greece to the contemporary United States - as a single, seamless continuum,” Baqaei said.

“This is the logic of anachronism: a distortion of historical time produced by the careless fusion of categories such as Greece, Rome, Christianity, Europe, America, and, ultimately, ‘America First,’” he said.

“It is as if America has finally discovered that ‘intimidation’ can be staged more effectively beneath the neon lights of a philosophy of history than in the bare idiom of the cowboy,” Baqaei added.

Baqaei said Rubio’s interpretation of the Greek concept of thumos as a celebration of national power overlooked an equally important part of the Greek intellectual tradition: its criticism of hubris, imperial ambition, injustice and the limits of power.

“Rubio lifts the Greek concept of ‘thumos’ out of its historical and philosophical setting and recasts it as a celebration of power - of force exercised without law or justice - along with competition and national will,” Baqaei said.

“That reading misses a constitutive half of the Greek inheritance,” he added.

"Greece was not only a theater of power and glory. It was also the birthplace of the tragedy of hubris and aggression, from the myth of Troy and Homer’s Iliad; of the critique of imperial ambition in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War; of political philosophy in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics; and of enduring meditations on the limits of power, moral responsibility, and human fate in Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus Rex,” Baghaei added.

Baqaei said the omission of this critical dimension of Greek thought turned history from an instrument of inquiry and reflection into what he called a tool of political propaganda.

“This other half of the Greek legacy is deliberately omitted from Rubio’s narrative,” he said.

“History is thereby converted from a field of inquiry and critical reflection into an instrument of political legitimation,” Baqaei added.

“What emerges is not a philosophy of history, but a manufactured narrative designed to authorize U.S. militancy and to construct a convenient political myth: a distorted reconstruction of the past in which the politics of the present are made to appear inevitable and historically ordained,” he said.

“Once history is pressed into the service of legitimizing power—the unlawful and unjust use of force—its purpose is no longer to understand the past, but to glorify power itself,” Baqaei emphasized.

Baqaei also invoked Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1871 work The Apotheosis of War, saying the painting offered a counter-image to narratives that associate conquest with glory.

“Vasily Vereshchagin’s The Apotheosis of War offers a stark counter-image,” Baqaei said.

“Its pyramid of skulls, left behind by conquerors, confronts the mythology of glory with the material residue of conquest,” he added.

“It recalls what remains when history is reduced to the exaltation of power,” Baqaei said.

Baqaei called on Western intellectuals to defend the complexity of Western civilization and the integrity of historical inquiry against what he described as an attempt by an aggressive power to justify unrestricted force.

“At such a juncture, Western thinkers have a responsibility to defend history itself - and the philosophical complexity of Western civilization - against a distorted and apologetic reinterpretation by an aggressive power prepared to sacrifice a civilization’s human achievements in order to legitimize the unrestrained exercise of force,” he said.

Baqaei warned that the central danger went beyond an inaccurate interpretation of history and lay in using that interpretation to legitimize contemporary power.

“The danger lies not merely in misreading the past, but in appropriating it to authorize that force, and to aggrandize it, in the present,” he said.

Baqaei’s comments came after Rubio delivered a speech in Athens in which he drew on ancient Greek history and philosophy to frame his discussion of Western civilization, national power and the United States’ foreign policy.