Arms and the Man.(Histories, The Landmark Herodotus)

History--the rational and methodical study of the human past--was invented by a single man just under twenty-five hundred years ago; just under twenty-five years ago, when I was starting a graduate degree in Classics, some of us could be pretty condescending about the man who invented it and (we'd joke) his penchant for flowered Hawaiian shirts.

The risible figure in question was Herodotus, known since Roman times as "the Father of History." The sobriquet, conferred by Cicero, was intended as a compliment. Herodotus' Histories--a chatty, dizzily digressive nine-volume account of the Persian Wars of 490 to 479 B.C., in which a wobbly coalition of squabbling Greek city-states twice repulsed the greatest expeditionary force the world had ever seen--represented the first extended prose narrative about a major historical event. (Or, indeed, about virtually anything.) And yet to us graduate students in the mid-nineteen-eighties the word "father" seemed to reflect something hopelessly parental and passe about Herodotus, and about the sepia-toned "good war" that was his subject. These were, after all, the last years of the Cold War, and the terse, skeptical manner of another Greek historian--Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War, between Athens and Sparta, two generations later--seemed far more congenial. To be an admirer of Thucydides' History, with its deep cynicism about political, rhetorical, and ideological hypocrisy, with its all too recognizable protagonists--a liberal yet imperialistic democracy and an authoritarian oligarchy, engaged in a war of attrition fought by proxy at the remote fringes of empire--was to advertise yourself as a hardheaded connoisseur of global Realpolitik.

Herodotus, by contrast, always seemed a bit of a sucker. Whatever his desire, stated in his Preface, to pinpoint the "root cause" of the Persian Wars (the rather abstract word he uses, aiti?, savors of contemporary science and philosophy), what you take away from an initial encounter with the Histories is not, to put it mildly, a strong sense of methodical rigor. With his garrulous first-person intrusions ("I have now reached a point at which I am compelled to declare an opinion that will cause offense to many people"), his notorious tendency to digress for the sake of the most abstruse detail ("And so the Athenians were the first of the Hellenes to make statues of Hermes with an erect phallus"), his apparently infinite susceptibility to the imaginative flights of tour guides in locales as distant as Egypt ("Women urinate standing up, men sitting down"), reading him was like--well, like having an embarrassing parent along on a family vacation. All you wanted to do was put some distance between yourself and him, loaded down as he was with his guidebooks, the old Brownie camera, the gimcrack souvenirs--and, of course, that flowered polyester shirt.

A major theme of the Histories is the way in which time can effect surprising changes in the fortunes and reputations of empires, cities, and men; all the more appropriate, then, that Herodotus' reputation has once again been riding very high. In the academy, his technique, once derided as haphazard, has earned newfound respect, while his popularity among ordinary readers will likely get a boost from the publication of perhaps the most densely annotated, richly illustrated, and user-friendly edition of his Histories ever to appear: "The Landmark Herodotus" (Pantheon; $45), edited by Robert B. Strassler and bristling with appendices, by a phalanx of experts, on everything from the design of Athenian warships to ancient units of liquid measure. (Readers interested in throwing a wine tasting a la grecque will be grateful to know that one amphora was equal to a hundred and forty-four kotyles.)

The underlying cause--the aiti?--of both the scholarly and the popular revival is worth wondering about just now. It seems that, since the end of the Cold War and the advent of the Internet, the moment has come, once again, for Herodotus' dazzlingly associative style and, perhaps even more, for his subject: implacable conflict between East and West.

Modern editors, attracted by the epic war story, have been as likely as not to call the work "The Persian Wars," but Herodotus himself refers to his text simply as the publication of his histori?--his "research" or "inquiry." The (to us) familiar-looking word histori? would to Herodotus' audience have had a vaguely clinical air, coming, as it did, from the vocabulary of the newborn field of natural science. (Not coincidentally, the cradle of this scientific ferment was Ionia, a swath of Greek communities in coastal Asia Minor, just to the north of Halicarnassus, the historian's birthplace.) The word only came to mean "history" in our sense because of the impact of Herodotus' text.

The Greek cities of Ionia were where Herodotus' war story began, too. These thriving settlements, which maintained close ties with their mother cities across the Aegean to the ...