Short answers, pulled from the story.
Herodotus was a Greek historian and geographer from Halicarnassus, born around 485 BC. The ancient Roman orator Cicero gave him the title The Father of History. His book the Histories is the earliest Greek prose to survive intact.
Herodotus wrote a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars, covering kings and battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. He also included cultural, ethnographical, and geographical background, as well as the rise of the Achaemenid dynasty of Cyrus.
Herodotus was branded the Father of Lies because of the strange stories and folk-tales he reported. The historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment, though Herodotus replied that he reported what he could see and what he was told.
Herodotus traveled in Egypt in association with Athenians, probably after 454 BC, then likely to Tyre and down the Euphrates to Babylon. Around 447 BC he migrated to Athens, and in 443 BC or shortly after he joined an Athenian-sponsored colony at Thurii in modern Calabria, Italy.
Herodotus is generally assumed to have died not long after 430 BC, possibly before his sixtieth year. The location is uncertain, with ancient sources suggesting Athens during a plague outbreak, Macedonia, or Thurii, and claimed graves in Athens, Macedonian Pella, and the agora at Thurii.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus listed seven predecessors of Herodotus, including Dionysius of Miletus, Charon of Lampsacus, Hellanicus of Lesbos, Xanthus of Lydia, and Hecataeus of Miletus. Only disputed fragments of Hecataeus's works survive.