Herodotus

Herodotus came from Halicarnassus, a Greek city under Persian rule in the 5th century BC, and later settled in Thurii in what's now southern Italy. He wrote the Histories, a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars and the rise of Cyrus's Achaemenid dynasty, covering Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and the other collisions that defined the age. The work veered off into ethnography, geography, and cultural sketches—context that made the narrative richer and stranger. His contemporaries, Thucydides chief among them, accused him of stuffing his pages with legends and fabrications for entertainm…