The ancient biographical tradition tells us that Herodotus spent time in Athens, and he was accused by some later Greeks of undue partiality to the Athenians. He is described as especially a friend of Sophocles, who addressed to him, about 445-440 BCE, a poem of which a fragment survives. Certain passages in Sophocles' extant work are clearly related to passages in Herodotus, and it seems certain that it was the tragedian who drew on the historian, not the reverse.

It has been thought that it was his stay in Attica that made Herodotus into an historian, not a mere chronicler or antiquarian, and that the impact of tragedy was responsible for the moral interest of his work: 'Athens was his Damascus'. He appears to emerge suddenly from a much less developed and sophisticated tradition of historical writing. 'Herodotus is an unaccountable phenomenon in the history of literature', says the perceptive Denniston; 'he is in the direct line of succession to the logographers [early historical writers such as Hecataeus and Hellanicus]; but while they, apparently, had no technique at all, he had a technique at once effortless and adequate to any demands he chose to make upon it'. Nor is it simply a matter of style in the sense of arrangement of words, masterly as Herodotus is in that art, but of his conception and his scope.