Revisiting the Myth of Western Civilization's Origins
The Story
The idea of Western civilization as an unbroken tradition running from ancient Greece to modern Europe is more myth than history, argues classical archaeologist Naoise Mac Sweeney, who insists there is no golden thread unfurling unbroken through time from Plato to NATO.
She points out that the ancient Greeks and Romans were far more diverse than usually depicted, neither predominantly white nor European, and did not conceive of race and geography the way modern societies do.
Classical learning was carried and expanded well beyond Europe, from the sciences studied in the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad to Sudanese merchants who traded in Greek and Buddhist sculptors in northern India who drew on Greek artistic traditions.
The concept of a distinct West took shape only later, as Renaissance thinkers engaged intensively with antiquity and seventeenth century European empires sought to justify colonization.
By the eighteenth century, American revolutionaries invoked Western civilization to reconcile the contradiction of championing freedom while permitting slavery, treating it as a privileged inheritance that rationalized unequal treatment.
The real history of the West, Mac Sweeney concludes, is far richer and more complex, shaped by centuries of intercultural exchange rather than any innate superiority.
She points out that the ancient Greeks and Romans were far more diverse than usually depicted, neither predominantly white nor European, and did not conceive of race and geography the way modern societies do.
Classical learning was carried and expanded well beyond Europe, from the sciences studied in the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad to Sudanese merchants who traded in Greek and Buddhist sculptors in northern India who drew on Greek artistic traditions.
The concept of a distinct West took shape only later, as Renaissance thinkers engaged intensively with antiquity and seventeenth century European empires sought to justify colonization.
By the eighteenth century, American revolutionaries invoked Western civilization to reconcile the contradiction of championing freedom while permitting slavery, treating it as a privileged inheritance that rationalized unequal treatment.
The real history of the West, Mac Sweeney concludes, is far richer and more complex, shaped by centuries of intercultural exchange rather than any innate superiority.
Why It Matters
Mac Sweeney's argument has left the seminar room and entered the speech text. Marco Rubio told the Munich Security Conference in February 2026 that the West is bound by "Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry" and that America will not caretake its "managed decline," a framing IPS calls imperial nostalgia and the hall met with a standing ovation. The academy pushes the other way: a March 2026 Quillette review calls the book a restatement of the "new orthodoxy" that there never was a West, and says defending the idea gets a classicist "tarred with the white supremacism brush." Two camps, neither reading the other. Watch whether Europe's leaders echo Rubio when Munich reconvenes in February 2027.
Go Deeper
Read the original reporting at Literary Hub.
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