Herodotus never really went out of fashion, so it's a bit misleading to say he's gone through a renaissance in recent years. Yet it could be enlightening to entertain that thought, if we are generous with the expression "recent years". There's many scholars (Donald Kelley, Paul Cartledge come to mind) who would settle that historiography can be split between the Herodotean and the Thucydidean tradition. In this context, Herodotean signifies Cultural History, quirky facts, unbased and unfiltered reports; Thucydidean, on the other hand, is "hard history", political history, no-nonsense, nothing that can't be proved.

I'm not here to defend either, and besides I am far from being the most adequate person to do so. I can however tell you that we have learned to see Herodotus in a far more nuanced light than the "father of lies" caricature that was prevalent, and I guess in a sense still is prevalent (see this comic for a humoristic take on it ). Whence this nuance? I will argue that we have started to read him both more philologically and more skeptically. Simultaneously, we have started to see the flaws in the rough cowboy view that we could have of Thucydides.

Reading him more philologically means paying more attention to the distance that he himself puts between the sources that he uses and his own opinion. Rather than thinking that he just believed whatever it is that he wrote, we've started to pay attention to his rhetoric: he lays down many options, but most of the times he makes it clear that he does not think that they are all valid. Many times he lays down his preference explicitly, either positively ("I think that this is true") or negatively ("I think that this is not true").

This is also what I mean by skeptically. Both Herodotus and Thucydides made use of reports - Herodotus even calls his own work a ἱστορία, historia, which in Greek means "inquiry". Yet Herodotus presents us with an almost unconceivable advantage over his "alternative": he does not eliminate those with whom he disagrees, or those whom he disbelieves. You might content that that is precisely the role of the historian, to exercise judicium, to have judgement, to know what to include and what not to include.

Yet in a world without explicit sources, without footnotes, without traceable material, that leaves us vulnerable to our trust in the historian at stake. If I don't have the alternative, the question is no longer "Do I trust Thucydides to have made the right choice concerning the Archidamian War?", but rather becomes, "Do I have a choice?" Yes, of course I have a choice, but Herodotus presents us with a more dettached point of view, one more skeptical towards the possibility of knowing the truth, or at least of being the final word on the matter. This is not to excuse his flights of fancy, which will be obvious to anyone reading the work, nor is it intended to give a philosophical justification to an "all things go" attitude to the writing of history. But it is more than enough to make us at least think twice before shelving him under "father of lies" and go read more serious historians.

Which brings us to another point. One of the reasons for the jesting attitude towards him is that he treats so-called soft history much more favourably - yes, he does cover the Persian Wars, but in between there's all this cultural history, with customs, dresses, and diet, all these womanly things, unlike the manly Thucydides that treats wars and realpolitik. Favouring one above the other does not need to be a gendered problem, but it often is.

Finally, there's the whole issue of reading a book already with expectations already formed about what we'll find there. As I said above, he wrote an ἱστορία/historía - a report. He's the father of History in the same way that Jesus is the father of Christianity, something that became wholy different than what the founding moment had been. Herodotus has many affinities both with the Ionian philosophers (of whom he was both a co-citizen and a contemporary), and he his book abounds with tragic elements and a moralizing (or existential) undertone that is far from being identifiable as simply "what happened in the Persian Wars". Many others tried to make sense of what the Persian Wars had been - Phrynicus and Aeschylus in the tragedians, Epicharmus in the comedians, Herodotus in this strange genre that was being founded. A genre that included a worldview often dripping with angst, one that includes plenty of falsehood, some of it intentional, some of it less so. Also one that is much more than that, and I think we're starting to recognize that.