One of the forms of literature that developed greatly in Classical Athens was historiography. Herodotus was to be nicknamed "pater historiae" ("the Father of History") by Cicero (De legibus 1,5), and the name has stuck.
Before looking at Herodotus' oeuvre it is advisable to mention the precursors of historiography and the meaning of the term history itself.
The Homeric epics already contain the seeds of historicity. There are family trees of heroes and a causal, chronological succession of events. This is consistent with the view that the composer of the poems had the instinct of the historian. Closer to what we mean by history were the works of the Ionian logographoi ('account-writers').
Logographoi was the name given by Thucydides to all previous writers. The term was used by Herodotus to keep poets separate from prose-writers. Later it was used to mean all writers of speeches (orators).
To see where the word history comes from we must go to the root 'Fid-' ('vid-'), meaning 'see'. This root has a derivative histor, meaning "a person who has seen something, a potential eye-witness". So 'history' is investigating and narrating on the basis of personal witness. As time went by, direct eye-witness was no longer a sine qua non: it was enough to narrate from eye-witnesses, providing the narrator also made a rational critique of the sources. If we take this as the criterion, it was Thucydides who was the representative par excellence of scientific historiography, whereas Herodotus had not yet reached this stage. Thucydides' work was continued by Xenophon. The names, and fragments of the works, of other writers of historiography have come down to us. One of these was Hellanicus.
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