A double marble bust, about 484-420 BC, of Herodotus (left), and Thucydides (right), joined back-to-back and facing, like bookends, in opposite directions, Photographed by Mike Maxwell in the summer of 2006 at an exhibit at the Colosseum in Rome.

Herodotus and Thucydides had quite different visions, standards and styles, as this famous bust might suggest. Which view of history, and which way of telling it, is best, is one of the questions historians still debate. Or once again debate. For the renewal of the debate is fairly recent, For over a century, Thucydides has been, at least in England and the US, the arbiter and model historian, while Herodotus has remained in his shadow, hauled out mainly as an example of how NOT to do history. The most quoted quip about Herodotus, once touted as the Father of History, is that he is the Father of Lies.

Of the nine books of Herodotus' "Histories," only the last four are devoted to the wars between the Persians and the Greeks. The first five are devoted to the different lands, cultures and customs of the kingdoms and regions absorbed, willy-nilly, into the Persian Empire. Why nine books? The whole thing was, in fact, originally just one long saga, its division into nine "books" being arbitrarily imposed upon it centuries later by Hellenistic editors, who didn't even number them but simply named them after the Nine Muses. (Their names are still used in some editions).

The strangeness, the oddness and "otherness" of the Egyptians, especially in their culture of Death (or is it of Life?) who worship gods whose bodies bear animal heads, and often animal bodies, seemed as odd to Herodotus as they do to us, and so he devotes an entire Book (Book 2) to them. Just as odd, those who study, say, Egyptian methods of embalming and have tried to replicate them, absent any Egyptian manuals on the art, must still rely on Herodotus for clues to their methods.

I did the same, turning to his account of Egyptian embalming to learn more about what the priests of Anubis actually did. Herodotus says that, like modern funeral directors, they offered three degrees of embalming, ranging from the expensive to the cheap, and illustrated each option with little figurines. There follows several technical accounts of the substances and procedures used to mummify and preserve the loved one's corpse - including the extraction through the nose and discarding of the brain, which in ancient times (and by many in our own) was thought to be a useless organ.

Herodotus doesn't say how he came by all this know-how. But now comes the sort of titillating account that drives stick-to-the-facts disciples of Thucydides up the wall: Herodotus tells us that the families of distinguished or beautiful women would wait three days before handing their now well-decayed loved ones over to the embalmers, and "This is due to prevent indignities from being offered them." Maybe so, but his only evidence is a story about a priest caught in flagrante delicto and punished by his peers.

Like Herodotus' report that Egyptian men urinate sitting down while the women urinate standing up, this sounds like the sort of tale tour guides use to entertain tourists. There's quite a bit of such stuff in the Histories. And though Herodotus often warns us his sources are not verifiable, purists trained in the school of Thucidydes (who himself went so far as to rule out any testimony by or about women) are appalled by his use of them, viewing them as pandering to his readers - as entertainment, not history.

The line quoted above on the "indignities" of certain embalmers is, by the way, from a sanitized and figleafed Victorian translation of Herodotus in 1862 by George Rawlinson, Professor of Ancient History at Oxford. Even if you're squeamish, I'm sure you can imagine what was really going on, and don't need to consult later translations such as "abusing the corpse," "violating the corpse," or even "having sex with the corpse."

I don't know how Andrea Pervis translates this passage in the new "Landmark Herodotus." She probably tells it like it is. Current squeamishness is not about sex but about what is not "politically correct." So, lest she offend anyone, Pervis , like other modern translators, substitutes "foreigners" for Herodotus' "barbarians" - so-called because to Greek ears their speech sounded like babbling "bar-bar." But it seems to me that even the most untutored student who doesn't already know this wouldn't mind learning it, and without being offended by it. (For more on her translation, and others, see my previous article "Translating Herodotus - an impossible task?")

Peter Green, in his review of "The Landmark Herodotus" in the current New York Review of Books, starts out with just the sort of apocryphal anecdote that Thucydides and his modern disciples avoid like the plague:

"When Herodotus was giving a public reading to an Athenian audience from his work-in-progress, one late source relates, among those present, brought along by his father Olorus, was the adolescent Thucydides. Herodotus' performance allegedly reduced the boy to tears, and the speaker, duly flattered, declared: "Olorus, your son has a natural love of learning."

Green admits this anecdote is "almost certainly fictional." But he cites it anyway, and gives it a cynical twist, suggesting its unknown late author intended the lad's tears to be read as "precipitated by furious competitiveness rather than admiration. The young paragon was all set, first to learn everything he could, without acknowledgment, from his famous predecessor, and then to work out a methodology that would bury him without trace as a gullible and frivolous popularizer."

Wow! So now, with the New Historicism's blending of fact and fiction, is Herodotus and his popular "Homeric" approach to history now in the ascendant, and Thucydides' style and star now on the wane?

Not quite, it seems. For the battle between the two styles is still in doubt. Concedes Green: "It is still going to take a lot of work to dislodge the public notion that the Father of History was, if not quite the Father of Lies, at any rate a simple-minded traditional storyteller, imaginative but credulous, who needed the stern corrections of Thucydides to put him straight."

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Selected readings and links:

* A nice place to start is Miike Maxwell's "Herodotus and Thucydides," online at http://www.studentsfriend.com/historians.html
A handy comparison of the main contrasts between the two historians, lined up beneath Mike's photo of their double marble portrait.

* "The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories," edited by Robert B. Strassler, translated from the Greek by Andrea L. Purvis, with an introduction by Rosalind Thomas.Pantheon; $45. Loaded (some say overloaded) with 148? maps, and 28 appendices..

Here are two fine reviews, with plenty of background and reflection on Herodotus, Thucydides, and the new "Landmark Herodotus."

* Peter Green, "The Great Marathon Man," The New York Review of Books, May 15, 2008, pp 33-4 & 44. Online at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21370

Peter Green is Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin and Adjunct Professor at the University of Iowa. His most recent book is The Hellenistic Age: A Short History. (May 2008)

* Daniel Mendelsohn, "Arms and the Man. What was Herodotus trying to tell us?"
The New Yorker Magazine, April 28, 2008, online at:
www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/04/28/080428crbo_books_mendelsohn?currentPage=all

Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million", which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Prix Médicis Étranger in France. He teaches at Bard College in upper New York.State. (January 2008)