To be fair, Herodotus also didn't believe everything he wrote down. Both implicitly such as recording blatantly mutually exclusive accounts, as well just just explicitly stating that he didn't believe everything on several occasions such as "it is my business to record what people say, but I am by no means obliged to believe it."

He was pretty open about the fact that he basically wrote down any interesting stories, and was not attempting to find some historical truth, but instead transition as much as possible from oral tradition to written.

He mostly gets called the father of history for this semi-novel take. That you can (and in most cases, should) strive for recorder and interpreter to be separate tasks.