The Suda says his family was influential, that he was the son of Lyxes and Dryo and the brother of Theodorus, and that he was also related to Panyassis – an epic poet of the time. Herodotus was, according to his own statement, at the beginning of his work, a native of Halicarnassus in Anatolia, and it is generally accepted that he was born there around 485 BC. Still, certain points may be approximately fixed . The data are so few – they rest upon such late and slight authority they are so improbable or so contradictory, that to compile them into a biography is like building a house of cards, which the first breath of criticism will blow to the ground.

Modern scholars generally turn to Herodotus' own writing for reliable information about his life, : 7 supplemented with ancient yet much later sources, such as the Byzantine Suda, an 11th-century encyclopedia which possibly took its information from traditional accounts. A sizable portion of the Histories has since been confirmed by modern historians and archaeologists. However, Herodotus explained that he reported what he could see and was told. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment. Herodotus has been criticized for his inclusion of 'legends and fanciful accounts' in his work. His work deviates from the main topics to provide a cultural, ethnographical, geographical, and historiographical background that forms an essential part of the narrative and provides readers with a wellspring of additional information. The Histories primarily cover the lives of prominent kings and famous battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale.

He is referred to as ' The Father of History', a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero. Herodotus was the first writer to perform systematic investigation of historical events. He is known for having written the Histories – a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. 425 BC) was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria ( Italy).

The Histories by Herodotus