Who is often referred to as "The Father of History"?

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. This is a method of studying the changing interpretations of past historians to events instead of studying the events directly.

"The Histories" is the only work which he is known to have produced. It is a collection of writings on the Greco-Persian Wars. Some of his stories are fanciful and others inaccurate; yet he states that he is reporting only what he was told; a sizable portion of the information he provided was later confirmed by historians and archaeologists. Despite Herodotus's historical significance, little is known of his personal life.

His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact. Herodotus serves as the primary, and often only, source for events in the Greek world, Persian Empire, and the region generally in the two centuries leading up until his own day.