Cicero called him the father of History. His critics called him the father of lies. Both had a point. Greek traveler from Halicarnassus (5th century BC) whose Histories set out to explain the wars between Greeks and Persians and got gloriously distracted along the way: Egypt, Scythia, customs, rivers, giant gold-digging ants. His method was the revolutionary part: travel, ask, compare versions, and separate “what I saw” from “what they told me”, writing down even the things he did not believe, because his duty was to record what was said. The word history is his: in Greek it just meant investigation. Ryszard Kapuściński claimed him as the first reporter, and it is hard to disagree.