The Battle of Marathon and the first marathon

About 2,500 years ago, one of the biggest empires in the world was Persia. Its king, Darius, ruled lands from Egypt to India. The Greeks called the Persians and all other foreigners βάρβαροι: people who did not speak Greek.

Some Greek cities on the coast of today’s Turkey rose up against Darius, and Athens sent ships to help them. Darius wanted to punish Athens. In 490 BC a Persian fleet crossed the Aegean Sea. The historian Herodotus says it had 600 warships. First the Persians captured the city of Eretria, on the island of Euboea. Then they landed on the beach of Marathon, about 40 kilometres from Athens.

Marathon was a wide, flat plain by the sea, with a big marsh at one end. Its name probably comes from μάραθον, fennel: a green plant with a strong smell that grew there. Greeks still cook with μάραθο today.

The Athenian army marched to Marathon. It had about 9,000 soldiers called hoplites (ὁπλῖται), who fought with a heavy round shield and a long spear. The small city of Plataea sent about 1,000 more men. The Persian army was much bigger. Historians often say 20,000 to 25,000 men, but nobody knows the exact number.

Before the battle, the Athenian generals sent a runner to Sparta to ask for help. His name was Philippides (some books call him Pheidippides). He was a ἡμεροδρόμος, a “day-runner”: his job was to carry messages on foot. Herodotus says that he reached Sparta the day after he left Athens. That is a run of more than 200 kilometres!

The Spartans said yes, but not at once. Herodotus explains that a religious law did not let them march out before the full moon. So the Athenians had to fight almost alone.

The Athenians had ten generals. One of them, Miltiades, had a clever plan. He made the Greek line as long as the Persian line. The middle of the line was thin, but the two ends, called the wings, were strong.

Then the Athenians did something new. Herodotus says they were the first Greeks he knew of who attacked the enemy at a run. They ran across almost one and a half kilometres of open ground. In the fight, the middle of the Greek line was pushed back. But the strong wings won, turned around and attacked the Persians in the middle. The Persians fled to their ships, and many drowned in the marsh.

Herodotus gives the numbers of the dead: about 6,400 Persians and 192 Athenians. The Athenians buried their dead on the battlefield, under a big hill of earth called a τύμβος. You can still see this mound at Marathon today. Right after the battle, the army hurried back to Athens, and the Persian fleet sailed home. When 2,000 Spartans arrived, the battle was already over.

Today many people tell this story: after the battle, a runner raced from Marathon to Athens, announced the victory and fell down dead. But is it true? Herodotus, who wrote a few decades after the battle, does not tell it. The story appears in writers who lived more than 500 years later. Plutarch gives two names for the runner, Thersippus or Eucles. Lucian calls him Philippides, and his last words are «Χαίρετε, νικῶμεν», “Rejoice, we win!” Most historians think the run to Athens is a legend, perhaps mixed up with the real run to Sparta.

The legend gave the world a new sport. For the first modern Olympic Games, in Athens in 1896, the French scholar Michel Bréal suggested a long race from Marathon to Athens. The winner was a young Greek, Spyridon Louis, who was the first to run into the Panathenaic Stadium. Since then, long races all over the world are called marathons. In Greek the race is ο μαραθώνιος, and today it is always 42.195 kilometres long.