Herodotus was a Greek historian and geographer who was born in the city of Halicarnassus, which was part of the Persian Empire and is now Bodrum, Turkey. He later moved to Thurii, which is now in the Italian region of Calabria (Italy). The Histories, a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars, was written by him. Herodotus has been criticized because his work has "legends and made-up stories." Thucydides, a historian who lived at the same time, said that he made up stories for fun. But Herodotus said that he only wrote about what he could see and hear. Herodotus would have told people about his research by reading it out loud in front of a crowd. In the introduction to the Penguin edition of the Histories, John Marincola says that there are parts of Herodotus's early books that could be called "performance pieces." Thucydides and Herodotus became friends over time, and they became close enough that they were both buried in Thucydides' tomb in Athens.
