Sanity seems conspicuously absent from his actions. What mind, driven by a profound disregard for history and human dignity, barges into the world’s sanctuaries—smashes centuries-old monuments, torches international norms, and ridicules the rites that stitch whole peoples together? Is he mad?
This vandalism baffles us until we recall a simple law: every culture loves its own reflection. Stage the planet’s largest opinion poll and each tribe will rank its customs first—whether it is festival fires timed to an ancient moon, lullabies sung to half-forgotten gods, funerary chants that braid the living to the dead, or the White House’s annual turkey reprieve. These are the bone and sinew of a people; to mock them is to unpick identity itself. Far from ‘unconventional’, edgy or enlightened, such ridicule is merely a symptom of narcissistic derangement.
Pronouns, like the cultural rites and traditions we cherish, have become symbols of identity—tools not just for communication, but for asserting who we are in the world. What were once simple linguistic tools to maintain the clarity and flow of language have now been elevated to shields of identity carried on email signatures and social media handles. In the opening line, his and he float without a name, yet a current meme assures us that if you say, “He’s an idiot,” ninety per cent of the world will picture the same face.
But here’s the twist: those two opening paragraphs didn’t originally refer to the leader who instigated the deadly assault on the Capitol. The same who refers to people’s homes as “shithole countries,” or blanket labels Mexicans “rapists.” This wasn’t the same person who told American congresswomen of color to “go back” to “the crime-infested places from which they came,” or who declared that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS.” The former reality TV star who has referred to menial work as “black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” who claimed Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts,” and who described an American city as a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” This cruelty and madness are evident in his statements like, “The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.’”
This isn’t a quote from one of the “enemies of the American people,” those “disgusting and corrupt,” “crooked” media outlets that he claims have “become so partisan, distorted, and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked.” These paragraphs weren’t written by the “terrible people” and “scum” who dare to keep us informed amidst his full-frontal attack on press freedoms and the fourth estate.
No, this passage is a modern echo of a text penned some 2,500 years ago, by a man whose words would, in time, come to shape the strategies of rulers and despots alike. A figure who, in his exploration of power, tyranny, and the fragility of human empire, set down the first sketches of what would become the playbook for intolerant autocrats—long before his first bankruptcy.
Its author, in many ways, detailed the mechanisms that tyrants continue to mine for their own purposes: controlling history, rewriting the past, and consolidating power. In his Histories he made a promise to preserve human deeds from fading, explaining not just what happened, but why—the motivations behind the Greek-Persian wars.
It begins, “Herodotus of Halicarnassus presents his research here so that the deeds of people may not be erased by time, nor that the extraordinary accomplishments—of Greeks and non-Greeks alike—lose their deserved fame, and above all, to explain why they fought each other in this war.”
Before his revolutionary book, the past was recorded as merely a series of events—bullet points on the clay tablet timelines of human existence. But Herodotus didn’t just chronicle happenings; he sought to understand their causes—Persian expansionism, Greek resistance, cultural clashes. He transcended the binary, recognizing that life is complex and that every story has at least two sides. In doing so, he essentially invented the word history—not just as a record of the past, but as a process of inquiry that helps us understand human experience.
He was fascinated with how different cultures shape their ideas. In something so simple as observing how a letter is written, from left to right and right to left. He audaciously challenged commonly held truths. At a time when Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were viewed as fact rather than fiction, he dared offer a different take. In Egypt, the priests of Memphis told him a tale that unraveled Greek legend: when Paris fled Sparta with Helen, storms drove them across the Mediterranean to Egypt, where King Proteus, appalled by the adultery, imprisoned Helen and banished Paris.
For ten years, the Greeks besieged Troy, deaf to the Trojans’ desperate truth—“Helen isn’t here!”—until Menelaus, arriving in Egypt, found his queen waiting, her beauty untouched by war. The Trojan conflict, they claimed, was fought over a phantom. Herodotus treats a foreign source, the Egyptian accounts, with surprising deference, contrasting their record-keeping (carved in stone, preserved by priestly castes) with Greek oral poetry (embellished by bards like Homer). He used Egyptian skepticism to critique Greek myths while marveling at their shared humanity.
His observations demonstrate that he was not simply a recorder of events; he was a writer with an insatiable curiosity about the world and the human condition. He was the first to approach the past not as a mere collection of facts, but as a tapestry of stories, narratives that wound through the diverse and often contradictory cultures of the ancient world.
His Histories is as much about the relationships between peoples, their beliefs, their gods, and their kings, as it is about battles won and lost. For Herodotus, historiē (inquiry) meant weighing up versions—not to simply crown one “true,” but to expose how stories reflect their tellers. His greatness lies in his ability to reach across time and geography, blending history with anthropology to give us a richly textured understanding of ancient societies—whether through the beliefs, customs, or individual voices of the people who lived them.
Yet, as Herodotus’ work reminds us, those who control history—its narratives and truths—wield an unparalleled power. This dynamic is not confined to ancient Persia or Greece, but is just as relevant in the age of modern authoritarianism. Today, as in the past, those who seek to dominate the past through the manipulation of history, myth, and narrative hold the keys to shaping the future.
Even when he was describing kings, he didn’t do so in the sycophantic manner we see today in the Kremlin and the White House. He did so by recognizing their humanity, like the story of King Candaules of Lydia. A king who loved his wife beyond reason, so fiercely that he believed no mortal eyes had ever beheld such beauty. Yet this certainty became an obsession—for how could others truly know unless they saw her as he did? “Men trust their ears less than their eyes,” he declared to his bodyguard Gyges, pressing him to hide in their royal chamber and witness the queen unrobed. Gyges recoiled: to strip a woman of her garments was to strip her of dignity, and the laws of men had long forbidden such trespass. But Candaules, drunk on pride, insisted.
That night, as the queen’s robes pooled to the floor, she caught Gyges’ shadow in the doorway. She did not cry out. Instead, dawn found her summoning him to deliver a choice sharp as a dagger’s edge: “My husband’s madness demands blood. Kill him and claim his throne—or die now for the crime of having seen what no man should.” Gyges, cornered, chose kingship over piety. With a single thrust, Candaules’ folly became his epitaph, and the throne passed to the man who knew too well the price of gazing where he ought not. Herodotus, ever the weaver of cause and consequence, lets the tragedy speak for itself: trust in eyes over ears may reveal truth, but not all truths are meant to be seen.
Though bound by the patriarchal norms of his time, Herodotus’ depiction of women—especially outside Greece—challenged prevailing biases. These women were not passive figures, but active shapers of history, defying expectations in ways that resonate even today. In his native Halicarnassus, Artemisia, the Persian naval commander, earned both Greek fury and his reluctant admiration. At Salamis, her cunning maneuvers humiliated the Athenian fleet, provoking the decree for her capture—a “disgrace” that revealed more about Greek insecurity than her prowess. Xerxes’ cry—“My men have become women, and my women men!”—became Herodotus’ sly indictment of rigid gender roles.
Elsewhere, he reveled in women who bent history: Nitocris of Babylon, the engineer-queen who drowned her enemies in a hidden river chamber; Tomyris of the Massagetae, who filled wineskins with Persian blood to quench her vengeance against Cyrus the Great; and Egyptian women who bartered in markets while their husbands wove cloth at home. Even when constrained by Greek norms—like Candaules’ nameless wife, whose wrath birthed a dynasty—Herodotus’ women wielded power through wit, will, or sheer audacity. His work whispers a radical truth: across empires, the threads of history were often pulled by hands the Greeks dismissed as too delicate to hold them.
This tension reflects Herodotus’ broader method: by contrasting Greek biases with the lived realities of Persian, Egyptian, and nomadic tribes, he exposed culture itself as a construct. Where Athenian drama portrayed women as either monsters or martyrs, his histories showed them as architects—of cities, wars, and sometimes, their own legends.
His opening sentence frames history as both a memorial and an investigation, creating a model for all later historiography that is interested in the truth over the established version. His methodology was not one where history is solely written by the victors. He was not interested in the reductionist view of good vs. evil, good guys and bad guys with black and white cowboy hats. He spoke to those who were actually there when he could, foreshadowing journalism and providing valuable insight into how we can coexist in a world where people rub shoulders with differing perspectives. As the great classicist Tom Holland has said, Herodotus is the precursor to Wikipedia. Just as it may contain errors, so did his work. But the goal was the same: to gather information from diverse sources and narrate the story of humanity.
As a master of nuance and complexity, he was aware that to understand history, one must not merely recount the deeds of kings but also understand the beliefs, values, and customs that gave rise to them. His work was a groundbreaking exploration of cultural differences, an early attempt to make sense of how civilizations, despite their stark differences, are bound together by common threads of ambition, fear, and hope. He understood, as no one recorded had before him, that history is not just about wars and kings but about the stories of the people who lived through them. And in these stories, he saw the patterns of human nature itself: the desires for power, for recognition, for revenge, for survival and for fun.
Roaming to the fringes of the known world at the time, he gives us a peek at how people not only killed each other, but how they let their hair down. Across modern day Ukraine and the Central Asia step he tells how the Scythians, “… take the seed of this hemp [κάνναβις, kánnabis] and, creeping under their felt tents, they throw it onto red-hot stones. The seed then smokes and gives off a vapor unsurpassed by any Greek steam-bath. The Scythians, delighted, shout for joy in their intoxication. This serves them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water.”
And just as soon as he was bestowed with the title of the Father of History by Cicero, his haters came out, smearing him as The Father of Lies. Like today’s truthers, the idea of a reality that didn’t match with their own bigotry enraged them. A few hundred years later, Plutarch would label him philobarbaros, barbarian-lover, or perhaps bleeding heart liberal would be today’s epithet hurled at him from the pulpits of Fox News. All for the crime of recognizing non-Greeks as something more than caricatures. He did not hold that the Greeks were the only ones who had cracked civilization. The very digressions he is criticized for—the long, almost meandering tangents into Ukraine, Egypt and beyond—are precisely because he was so fascinated by how others think, how they live, how they behave, what their achievements are, and how. Even in their differences, they possessed a shared humanity.
Although the Chinese whispers he heard were at times garbled in mistranslation and misinterpretation, they reveal the horizons of the peoples he studied, recording as accurately as possible their internal beliefs. Herodotus, in other words, wasn’t merely recounting events. He was scrutinizing and comparing the various accounts of different peoples, interpreting their variations, and seeing the common threads that bind all of humanity. As he stated, “I am bound to tell what I am told, but not in every case to believe it.”
Indeed, his focus was not so much on difference as it was on the shared human nature that generates so many interesting variations, and which could only be thoroughly explored through its many manifestations. Herodotus didn’t just write about the world—he sought to understand it. His work is a testament to the idea that history is, at its core, an endless exploration of what it means to be human, in all our diversity and all our contradictions.
In Africa he watched Cambyses’ emissaries offer Tyrian purple cloaks, gold chains, and wine to an Ethiopian ruler who scoffed at such “gifts,” then bent an wooden-bow no Persian could draw: “Return when your men match this wood,” he warned. Cambyses never understood the lesson and as a result the desert swallowed his army whole.
Herodotus, ever the observer of human folly, preserves the moment—a fleeting encounter where two civilizations met, exchanged gifts, and walked away more certain than ever of their own righteousness. For what are gifts, after all, but mirrors held up to the giver’s soul? And in that exchange, the Persians saw only barbarians, while the Ethiopians beheld fools. Herodotus lets us decide.
As authoritarian regimes around the world seek to reframe narratives and impose a single, official version of history, Herodotus’ lessons become ever more urgent. His approach—an open, multi-perspective view of the past—stands in stark contrast to the revisionist histories being championed by today’s political leaders. The dangers of rewriting history—of erasing the very complexities that make us human—are evident in today’s political climate, where leaders attempt to enshrine their own legacies in stone and gold lame, to elevate themselves to the status of monuments.
Herodotus understood that history is never a simple recounting of facts. It is a battlefield of ideologies. Today, just as then, those in power seek to control history, from the falsehoods pushed by modern autocrats to the revisionism rampant in textbooks across the world. The erasure of uncomfortable truths is not just a political tool—it is a method of maintaining control over the future, just as Herodotus warned.
In China, Xi Jinping’s 2024 Patriotic Education Law writes ideological conformity into statute, mandating schools, museums and social-media platforms to “guide” citizens in the “correct view” of Party history and to combat “historical nihilism.” Scholarly works on the Great Famine or Tiananmen are disappearing from libraries, and new textbooks telescope Mao-era catastrophes into euphemisms such as “periods of exploration.”
Putin is recreating a Stalinesque past when things like blue jeans were considered anti-revolutionary. In August 2023 the Kremlin rushed a new, single-volume history textbook into every Russian high-school classroom. It describes the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a defensive “special military operation,” warning pupils that Western culture is “alien,” and frames sanctions as proof of Russia’s righteous isolation.
In Modi’s India, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has cut chapters on inconvenient events such as the Muslim Mughal courts, the 2002 Gujarat riots, caste protest movements and minority contributions from 2023–24 history texts. Moves critics say align the syllabus with Hindu-nationalist mythmaking.
Turkey’s ongoing religious descent continues as Erdoğan rolled out a curriculum that embeds Ottoman revivalism, excises secularist milestones, and presents the 1915 Armenian genocide as a Western “lie.” The increasingly militant Islamist dismisses any criticism, insisting the goal is to raise a “pious generation.”
Javier Milei, Argentina’s far-right president, has faced significant backlash for actions and statements that downplay or justify the atrocities committed during the country’s military dictatorship. He has repeatedly questioned the widely accepted figure of 30,000 disappeared victims, suggesting the number is exaggerated, and has defended the dictatorship’s actions as a necessary response to left-wing guerrilla groups. His government has released a controversial video justifying state repression, while his vice president, Victoria Villarruel, has downplayed the dictatorship’s crimes, even referring to former detention centers as “museums of mis-memory.”
In Europe, a 2018 Polish law backed by the nationalist PiS party threatens fines or jail for anyone who suggests “the Polish nation” bore any responsibility for Nazi crimes, a measure historians say stifles honest study of local complicity in the Holocaust.
Viktor Orbán’s government is making similar moves as it bank-rolls a new Holocaust Museum whose draft exhibits, historians warn, cast Hungarians chiefly as victims of Nazi occupation and play down local collaboration in the deportation of 437,000 Jews in 1944.
Meloni’s rhetoric in Italy, which sometimes praises Mussolini’s role in Italian history, has sparked controversy, as has her government’s support for nationalistic narratives that minimize the negative aspects of fascism. There have been moves to revise education to highlight a more patriotic view of history, alongside actions to restore fascist monuments and symbols.
In Spain, the national government continues to try and pry open the pandoran pact of silence that stifles any real discussion and investigation into the Fascist dictatorship and the more than 100,000 bodies still lying in unmarked graves. But this is being fiercely fought against in regions like Aragon, Valencia, Andalusia and most recently Extremadura, where the right-wing PP party are supported by the extreme right. In attempts to whitewash their ideological founders, attempts are being made to write their own laws to benevolently recast the dictatorship, going so far as to disappear the word completely.
But the attacks on memory and how it’s told that will perhaps have the most far-reaching effects around the globe are the ones happening in America under the Trump administration. A regime allergic to anything that resembles truth, especially if it counters their skewed vision of the world.
Trump, like some modern-day tyrant channeling ancient despotism, is unfolding the atavistic, paleoconservative vision of Project 2025—a manifesto he feigned ignorance of during the campaign, dismissing it with a flippant “I’ve never read it, and I never will.” Yet, as though bound by some dark prophecy, he now brings its every tenet to life. With executive orders as his scepter and lawsuits as his cudgel, he commands a battalion of sycophants, from compliant judges to cultural institutions that dare not defy him, and from university presidents to press magnates—each forced into a cringing compliance. He has even proclaimed himself emperor of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, that hallowed ground now reduced to a bastion of political obedience.
In late March, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Its diagnosis is that there has long been among professors and curators “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” His sycophants, Mike Gonzalez and Armen Tooloee, laid out their plans much more aggressively in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece. In it they promised, “to put a spike through the heart of woke, Mr. Trump and the new Congress must reverse these policies.”
One need look no further than the Trump administration’s attempts to reshape the narratives of the Smithsonian—a symbol not only of American history, but of the broader authoritarian impulse to control and rewrite the past. An institution that stands alongside the British Museum, The Pergamon and others as global beacons of knowledge and cultural stewardship. Institutions, while revered for their treasures, now confront their colonial pasts—the very circumstances of their acquisitions, often through conquest and imperialism, now cast in a darker, more critical light. Their attempts at reshaping their narratives is not simply an effort to present a more unified national identity, but to ensure that history is molded in service to power.
The Smithsonian serves as a diplomatic bridge, rescuing artifacts from war zones, returning looted treasures, and fostering cross-cultural dialogue through exhibitions that span Indian-American history to Black and Latino heritage. Its reputation for rigorous, unbiased research has made it a trusted authority worldwide, even if they remind us of uncomfortable truths. These institutions are a direct reflection of what Herodotus began in attempting to tell everyone’s story, not just those of the ruling, privileged classes. As he said, “The most hateful grief of all human griefs is this, to have knowledge of the truth but no power over the event.”
The administration’s concerted push to wrest control of museums signals a troubling regression—one that harkens back to darker times when ‘othering’ and the distortion of historical narratives held unchecked sway. In the same op-ed, they did not hide their intent, openly decrying the very idea of these institutions “trying to decolonize society”—as if such a movement were something to be vilified, rather than a long-overdue reckoning with the legacy of empire.
Mythologizing the past does nothing to elevate a nation. It will not lead to greatness. It is only by confronting our darkest chapters, by acknowledging the wrongs we have done and ensuring that every voice is heard, that we can hope to build something lasting. To bury uncomfortable truths is to leave the door open to their return. The train tracks that snake under the barren watchtower at Birkenau evoke not only sorrow and revulsion, but serve as a solemn reminder: these rails must lead only one way, for there can be no turning back to that place of horror. The past, like a relentless tide, will continue to shape the future—only by facing it, not by hiding from it, can we hope to move forward.
As authoritarian regimes across the globe seek to reshape history to fit their narrow, power-driven agendas, Herodotus’ lessons take on an urgency that is impossible to ignore. His insistence on a multifaceted, open-ended inquiry into the past stands as a stark counterpoint to those who would reduce history to a single, distorted narrative. In a world where truth is so often malleable and facts are twisted to serve the powerful, Herodotus’ work reminds us that history must be fought for—not only by scholars but by all those who value a world where diverse voices, cultures, and perspectives can thrive. For when history is left in the hands of the powerful alone, it becomes nothing more than a weapon to entrench tyranny.
Herodotus understood this deeply. He grasped that true democracy—and the free exploration of history—required constant vigilance and accountability. As he wrote: “The rule of the majority, however, not only has the most beautiful and powerful name of all, equality [viz. equality before the law], but in practice, the majority does not act at all like a monarch… the majority chooses its magistrates by lot, it holds all of these officials accountable to an audit, and it refers all resolutions to the authority of the public.”
This is perhaps the key lesson we must carry forward: the fight for truth and accountability is not the responsibility of the few—be they curators, scholars, or caretakers—but of all who care to preserve the complexity and richness of our shared human story. Only when we hold power accountable—whether in our institutions or in the shaping of history itself—can we hope to prevent history from being rewritten to serve the will of a single, unchecked authority.
