All the chroniclers are dirty liars (or at least repeating dirty liars) anyway, so probably very little. If a word of Herodotus gets mistranslated, it would hardly be noticeable between all the crazy stories about monopeds and African tribes ruled by whoever is the hottest. He’d still be seen as a useful source on Achaemenid Persia.

If you’re referring to the impalement, one can only imagine it was supposed to be poetic, at least for male victims. It wasn’t just them, either; Christianity has a pretty typical ancient semitic view on same-sex activity, for example. I went with the Aztecs because it seemed like we were moving towards the whole “unspoiled progressive pre-Columbian America” thing, and unlike, say, medieval England there was a very specific documented punishment involved.