The Battle of Marathon and the Run That Gave the World a Race
by Bill Giannopoulos · Greek City TimesAs thousands of runners set off from Marathon toward Athens this weekend, they are tracing a route made famous almost 2,500 years ago, when a small Greek army stopped the Persian Empire on a coastal plain in Attica.
An empire at the door
In 490 BC, King Darius I of Persia sent a seaborne force across the Aegean to punish Athens and Eretria for supporting the Ionian Revolt. After sacking Eretria on Euboea, the Persians landed at the bay of Marathon, about 40 kilometres northeast of Athens.
Athens sent its fastest runner, Pheidippides, to Sparta to ask for help. According to the historian Herodotus, he covered the roughly 240 kilometres in about two days. The Spartans agreed to come but would not march until their religious festival ended with the full moon.
The battle
Around 10,000 Athenian hoplites marched out to meet the invaders, joined by about 1,000 men from the small city of Plataea. The Persian army was considerably larger; modern historians commonly estimate 20,000 to 25,000 troops.
Read more: Greece Restores the Wall Spartans Defended at Thermopylae
The general Miltiades persuaded his fellow commanders to attack. He thinned the centre of the Greek line and strengthened its wings. When the armies met, the Persian centre pushed forward, while the Greek wings broke their opponents and closed in from both sides. The Persians fled to their ships.
Herodotus records 6,400 Persian dead against 192 Athenians. Among the fallen was the polemarch Callimachus. The Spartans arrived the day after the battle, in time only to view the battlefield.
The legend of the run
The story of a runner carrying the news from Marathon to Athens does not appear in Herodotus. It comes from writers centuries later. Plutarch names the messenger as Thersippus or Eucles, while Lucian, writing in the second century AD, gives the name Philippides. In the popular version, the runner reached Athens, announced the victory and collapsed and died.
Whatever its historical basis, the tale took hold. When the modern Olympic Games were revived in Athens in 1896, the French scholar Michel Bréal proposed a long-distance race from Marathon to the city in its honour.
From legend to Olympic race
That first Olympic marathon was won by Spyridon Louis, a water carrier from Marousi, in 2 hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds. His victory made him a national hero. The distance was later standardised at 42.195 kilometres, based on the course of the 1908 London Olympics.
Today’s Athens Authentic Marathon follows the historic route from Marathon to the Panathenaic Stadium, where the 1896 Games were held.
Why Marathon still matters
The victory showed that the Persian army could be beaten and gave the young Athenian democracy, founded less than 20 years earlier, the confidence to resist the far larger invasion that came a decade later. The 192 Athenian dead were buried on the battlefield beneath a burial mound, the Soros, which still stands at Marathon.
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