Herodotus was no poet, a helluva good story teller, yes, but there is little poetry in his Histories. In Herodotus' days the Greek word Histories meant 'Enquiries.'

The title of Herodotus work is a first indicator of his motives and explains the purpose of devoting so many years of his life to, no doubt strenuous, travelling foreign lands. He doesn't recount any personal bad experience during his wanderings; if there were any, he doesn't tell. Banditry could be the way of life for people close to common roads and trails. There were also many more wild animals in that part of the world than there are now, since gladiatorial and hunting games depleted the region's large fauna to a great extent. Assyrian kings used to hunt lions. Rome finished them off. Only lions in deep Africa survived the people of the Mare Nostrum.

The Histories as title has several connotations:

[W]e perhaps need to remind ourselves that the enquiry denoted by the word historie in Herodotus' day has no specific, still less exclusive, connection with 'history' in the modern sense: Pythagoras is said to have used it of mathematical researches, and in the generation after Herodotus, Democritus, the author of the atomic theory of the composition of matter, used it both as the title of one of his writings and as a word to describe his own enquiries into the nature of matter. Gould (1989).

Something to consider when it comes to Herodotus' own perception of his research and writing. The Histories title fits well and is what intellectuals in neighboring Miletus had been doing for two centuries, a general search for truth, all kinds of enquiries with the reason as filter against magical thinking, and a view to look to the report of our senses and our sagacity to decide what is true or false. While some enquiries concentrated on questions of physics, Herodotus took another path (perhaps he was bad with numbers 8-).

An important difference is that Herodotus did not produce a work of poetry or a series of plays for people to have fun fantasies; he was as serious as philosophers, doctors, and mathematicians; with the advantge of the well-traveled man who has interesting conversation and stories to tell. His research also happened to cover the most epic and consequential events in the lives of the previous two generations. Herodotus sought to answer why and how Greeks and Persians had come to blows so spectacularly, and explain the irony of the surprise ending.

I would find it almost absurd that a man so devoted to winkling out the truth about the recent past, was instead devoted to telling a tale of deception, so well coordinated that independent parts in the narrative would support the big numbers lie. There could be no error in Herodouts numbers, because it is more than digits, it is a theme running through the histories, Xerxes' gigantic army is the elephant in the Histories.