SECRETARY RUBIO: 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.