POOR old Herodotus. For years his bearded, eyeless, battered visage has lent appropriate gravitas to the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of his Histories, and nobody gave a second thought to his dress sense or street cred.
Now his sculpted image is to be replaced by the golden limbed sultriness of Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas, in a new pocket sized Penguin version.
And if you're wondering what the 5th century BC Greek pioneer of historiography has to do with these Oscar nominated actors, then there has been an unaccountable glitch in The English Patient's marketing strategy.
Herodotus's Histories is the book which brings the two stars together in Anthony Minghella's romantic weepie. On a desert expedition in the 1930s, Katherine Clifton (Scott Thomas) borrows it from Count Ladislaus de Almasy (Fiennes) and reads, in beautifully modulated tones, the story of how Candaules, ruler of Lydia, lost his throne to his servant Gyges.
"This is the story of how I fell in love with a woman, who read me a specific story from Herodotus," Almasy recalls in Ondaatje's novel. When he survives a plane crash during the second World War and is tended by a French Canadian nurse (Juliette Binoche) in a Tuscan villa, his sole possession is "his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herodotus's Histories", with "other fragments - maps, diary entries, writing in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books" ... "all cradled within the text of Herodotus".
In anticipation of a sales rush, Everyman publishers shipped cratefuls of the complete text to New York last autumn, and a copy of the work of "the father of history" has since become an indispensable accessory.
The story of Candaules and his wife and servant is a famous one, in part, perhaps, because it occurs in the first five pages of the Histories; it will be interesting to see whether purchasers of the new edition read further than this dramatic tale. If they do, they might succumb to the charm of this infinitely curious author, who has unfurled his magic carpet of traveller's tales and ethnographic observations for generations of readers.
Born in 484 BC in the Greek city of Halicarnassus, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, Herodotus travelled extensively in Asia Minor, to the Black Sea, along the valley of the Euphrates to Babylon and to Egypt.
The name of his book (Historia) comes from the Greek word for "inquiry", and the stated purpose of his work was to "preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the great and remarkable achievements, both of our own and off other peoples; and more particularly, to show how they came into conflict."
The conflict at the heart of the Histories is the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians, which began when the Persians reached the Aegean in the 540s and culminated in the defeat of the Persian invasion of Greece under Xerxes, in the decisive battles of Marathon and Salamis.
But Herodotus does not confine himself to the Persian wars: his Histories are crammed with incidental interest.
The Histories would never pass intact through the hands of a publisher now: Herodotus can never resist a good story and the broadness of his theme allows for many digressions: "I am now going to give an extended account of Egypt, because it has a greater number of astonishing things in it, and presents us with a greater number of extraordinary works, than any other country; for that reason I shall say more about it."
Anecdote, colourful incident and a simplicity of style make Herodotus more accessible for the reader than the more forbidding syntax and thought processes of Thucydides, the masterly Athenian historian of the Peloponnesian war.
Thucydides considered Herodotus to be unreliable, and this verdict was reiterated by other ancient historians. Herodotus does not give us many clues to his sources, and his work is rooted in the oral tradition, derived from Homer and other epic poets.
He does make a distinction between what he has seen with his own eyes and what he has heard from others, and although he includes many fabulous tales, he reserves the right to disbelieve them. Archaeological excavations continue to validate his descriptions, however, especially of the customs of the nomadic Scythian tribes along the Black Sea.
The discursiveness and descriptive detail of the Histories may test the patience of a modern reader, but they are probably just the thing for dipping into on a desert mapping expedition. In the film they become part of the system of codes that communicates notions of exclusivity and privilege.
A leather bound book of Greek history is a commodity with a stamp of quality - as much as the Gladstone bags, fountain pens, hip flasks, fountain pens, crisp linens and clipped accents - which indicates that these characters are patrician.
In a marginally less crude manner, the novel also takes pains to establish its cultural pedigree: a crumbling Tuscan villa with a library, the frescoes in the village church, the minutiae of bomb detonation techniques, the metaphors of maps and mapping, the character inexplicably named Caravaggio; these are part of a self conscious attempt to engage the interest of "the serious reader".
Presumably, having survived this far, Herodotus will outlive, his reinvention as fogeyish status symbol.