Herodotus' polyester shirt

On 'the father of history', Herodotus (c.484 BC - c.425 BC):

 

'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'

 

- Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker, 28 April 2008