By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, October 09, 2026
In 2023 there was that whole thing about how all men—or a
lot of men—spend a shocking amount of time thinking about ancient Rome. It
became such a thing that Saturday Night Live did a great
bit on it.
I confess. I’m one of those guys. I don’t noodle Rome to
the exclusion of other nerdy woolgathering (or to get closer to the spirit of
things, omphaloskepsis or vigilans somniare). I also think about zombie
apocalypses, Red Dawn-style invasions, and time travel way more than is
productive.
Nick Catoggio had a typically excellent
essay yesterday on Legatus Marcus Antonius Rubio’s meditations, Kimberly
Guilfoyle’s grasping demand for largitonis (gifts and bribes), and the somnia
quaedam vigilantium (dreaming while awake) of the “Retvrn bros.”
Nick writes, “Rubio’s remarks can be summarized this way:
If his syncretic right-wing project was originally about trying to smuggle
liberalism into postliberalism, it’s now more the other way around.”
I think that’s basically right. The speech, surely
written by Nate Hochman, is a classic example of what is, in the Trump
era, often called “turd-polishing.” Roman rhetoricians called this sort of
thing “color.” Coloring wasn’t necessarily dishonest, it was more like simply
putting the relevant facts in the best possible light. But when the facts were
awful, coloring became a form of deception, or what we would call spin.
In his Controversiae, Seneca the Elder condemned people who spun
sordidly self-interested acts with lofty-sounding intellectual, often
completely hypothetical, defenses. When Kellyanne Conway defended Sean Spicer’s
lies about the crowd sizes at Trump’s first inauguration by invoking “alternative
facts,” she was trying to provide color in this sense. The late Scott Adams
was a master colorizer in this tradition.
Rudy Giuliani is another master of the craft. When Trump
pressured Volodymyr Zelensky to find dirt on Joe Biden, or simply allege
corruption, Giuliani declared on Twitter, “A President telling a Pres-elect of a
well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is
doing his job. Maybe if Obama did that the Biden Family wouldn’t have bilked
millions from Ukraine and billions from China; being covered up by a Corrupt
Media.”
Not everyone can play at Rudy’s level, though. For
instance, when Trump butt-tweeted “covfefe,” his praetorians rallied to the idea
there was an esoteric genius behind it. David Danford, writing
at American Greatness, tried valiantly to polish the turd until he
saw his reflection in it, suggesting that it might have been a bastardized
Arabic phrase—“I will stand up”—aimed at the Middle East and/or to goad people
with Trump derangement syndrome into revealing themselves. Or something.
But Legatus Rubio’s speech took it to a whole other, world historic level. In
Rubio’s telling, the great contribution of the Greeks that defined Western
civilization ever since was combat and glory. Not physical combat per se, but
combat all the same.
For the Greeks of
antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence.
They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in
philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and
statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and
prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual
struggle—to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful,
straining to inch ever closer to perfection.
Now I know that to
modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may
even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly,
become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with
neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. …
The men who made
the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble
aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the
best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled. They were
filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But
from that constant struggle for distinction—from that came the great
flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that
would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the
greatest civilization in the world. [Emphasis mine]
John Podhoretz texted me yesterday after watching it,
“The speech was half Straussian half Randian all Claremontian.” I hear a bit
more Nietzsche than Rand, but the point is the same. In Rubio’s telling, the
Greeks were toga-clad Übermenschen, driven by a thirst for proving
themselves in perpetual contest with each other and everything. “The thumos, as
the ancient Greeks called it—the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride—is
the heart of great civilization,” Rubio also said. “And without it? Without it,
nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.”
Nietzsche was pithier. “Every talent must express itself
in fighting,” he writes in Homer’s Wettkampf (Homer’s Contest). “In this
brooding atmosphere, fighting is salvation,” he adds. And: “Thus the Greeks,
the most humane people of ancient times, possess a trait of cruelty, a tigerish
lust to annihilate: a trait that is also quite visible in that grotesquely
magnified reflection of the Hellenes, Alexander the Great, and which must
terrify us if we approach it in their entire history as in their mythology with
the flabby concept of modern humanity.”
In Rubio’s defense, he does acknowledge that the Greeks
also laid the “foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science, our
medicine. Our philosophy, ethics, and religion. It paved the way for the gospel
of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of
Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology—of
Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law.”
But while he repeatedly uses words like “passion,”
“courage,” “contest,” “competition,” and “glory,” he doesn’t mention “reason”
(and has only a single glancing mention of “liberty”). He alludes to reason
with that bit about science, but it recedes into just another expression of will.
Indeed, again and again, Rubio conflates different
virtues and different values into themes of will and passion. “We see this in
Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth even at the cost of his
own life. We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans …” Sure, these are
two examples of courage, but they are properly understood as very different
kinds of courage. “These are the qualities that would shape the Western moral
imagination. From the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the
patriot who gave his life for his country; from Saint Thomas More to the Battle
of the Alamo.” The courage of military glory is noble and so is the courage of
conscience. But they are not the same thing. When you flatten Christian virtue
and military or prideful glory to expressions of the same thing, you drain the
best version of Western civilization of its true greatness.
The Christian philosopher Edward Feser’s response
to Rubio says it well:
It is not thumos
that is the heart of the greatest civilizations, but reason. And it is not the
“struggle for distinction” that made the West, but the pursuit of the true and
the good. It was this Socratic pursuit, not Spartan pride, that led the Church to
embrace the achievements of the Greeks. As Plato warns in the Republic, to
subordinate reason to thumos and the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of honor
is the mark of timocracy, the first of the four corrupt types of polity and
corrupt types of soul he identifies.
Which brings me to Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was sitting in
the front row for Rubio’s speech. Guilfoyle left her perch at Fox News for (allegedly—the
editors) sharing pictures of various men’s penises and for treating staff the
way Roman aristocrats treated their Thracian slaves. While Rubio was doing his
swing through Greece, the Wall Street Journal reported that she had
asked a Trump donor to pay her $100,000 American Express bill before she
appeared at her confirmation hearing to become ambassador to Greece.
And that brings me back to Rome. When Guilfoyle’s
nomination was announced, I joked with friends that this was just so Roman. The
paramour of the emperor’s crapulent firstborn son was being sent to Greece like
Julia the Elder dispatched to Pandateria. Out of sight, out of mind. Let her
shake down the colonials for tribute—which she did!
The specific people Nick refers to as the “Retvrn bros”
are the people who take their Roman Empire woolgathering too far
and think we’d be better off living in Ancient Rome rather than under
“globohomo” tyranny (because there were no “homos” in that would-be global
empire). Like the reincarnation obsessives who always think they were kings or
warriors in their retrotopian past lives, they all seem to think they’d be
Roman generals rather than sex slaves or short-lived tenant farmers.
What I find so amusing about all of the high-minded
coloring of Trumpian timocracy is the delta between the rhetoric and the
reality. Trump is actually extremely Roman in his understanding of power and
politics. He talks a lot about greatness, but everything is reduced to personal
loyalty; if he grants a beneficium (benefit) he is owed officium (obligations).
“I
pardoned Democrat Henry Cuellar, but he refused to become a Republican to pay
his debt to me. Very disloyal, vote him out!” Supreme Court justices should
show him loyalty. “I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against
me often.” He told FBI Director James Comey before he decided to fire him, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” Personal loyalty is
prized over expertise. Pardons are a reward for loyalty (and money). Law firms that capitulate are then offered
protection, or deditio in fidem.
We can do this all day. Bread ($5,000 checks!) and
circuses (gladiatorial games on the White House lawn). Trump’s favorite Bible verse is an “eye for an eye.” Conquest is
for glory and taking the oil. His triumphal arch and a military parade on his
birthday. Even the dangling of possible executions. His insistence that his power is derived from
the people more than the Constitution, which would be too constraining. The
executive branch is essentially Caesar’s household, subservient to his whims,
not the law. Disagreement is treachery. And so on.
The difference in Trump’s mind is that his model isn’t
Ancient Rome, but the weird and distorted vestige of it: the
Mafia, which famously borrowed Roman styles of organization as a kind of
cosplay to lend a veneer of virtuous color to criminality.
And that’s how I hear Legatus Rubio’s celebration of
Western civilization as conquest of territory, nature, science, art, and the
yearning to Make Western Civilization Glorious Again. “What is happiness?”
Nietzsche asked. “The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is
overcome.”
Rubio’s Ode to a Grecian Yearn is great color. But it’s
in service to the sorts of people who think that happiness is having your Amex
bill paid off by one of Caesar’s clients.
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