Never before in contemporary world history has a President of the United States (POTUS) been so publicly maligned, abused and reviled, as Donald Trump through 2025-2026. Besides millions who have suffered and died violent deaths because of authoritarian American policies in different parts of the world, US citizens have now taken to the streets and minced no words during the ‘No King’ anti-war campaign. Never before has such volatility and uncertainty been created in economies across the world, following executive orders of the White House.

While POTUS, as a belligerent war commander is leading multinational armies and high-technology arms attacking the ancient lands of West Asia, it is fascinating to plough through ‘The Histories’ of Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian who is probably the first to have questioned the reason for hostilities and conflicts in the world. ‘The Histories’ was written 2500 years ago by Herodotus; obviously his world was much smaller than ours even though he set out to record ‘human events’.

At the start of the book, he stated: “Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is in particular the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks.” Scholars over the centuries have identified this passage as the key to understanding the entire Histories. What was the world of Herodotus?

It was the Aegean Sea, with its mountainous and forested lands: areas lying on the western shore constituted Greece; those on the eastern, Persia. “And so right away we hit upon the heart of the matter ~ Herodotus is born, grows up and just as he starts to figure out everything around him, one of his very first observations is that the world is sundered, split into East and West and that these halves are in a state of dissension, conflict, war,” wrote Ryszard Kapuściński, one of Poland’s finest traveller-reporters whose ‘Travels with Herodotus’ remains a cult book, translated in English in 2008.

With his emphasis on reporting ‘human events’ and the cause of hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks, Herodotus revealed his stature as a visionary reporter-chronicler who cannot be thought of as a provincial scribe or a narrow-minded lover of Athens and the Greek way of life. “The author of The........

© The Statesman