The History of Herodotus by Herodotus.... Herodotus was a Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus in the Persian Empire (modern-day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the fifth century BC (c. 484-c. 425 BC), a contemporary of Thucydides, Socrates, and Euripides. He is often referred to as "The Father of History," a title first conferred by Cicero; he was the first historian known to have broken from Homeric tradition to treat historical subjects as a method of investigation-specifically, by collecting his materials systematically and critically, and then arranging them into a historiographic narrative.