Hello, χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History episode 32, “The Persians are Coming: Showdown at Marathon.” I’m Scott Emmons.

Over the last few episodes, I’ve looked ahead to the Persian Wars as a defining moment for the Greeks. Their victories over the invading Persians shaped their image of themselves, gave them a heightened confidence, and I would say inspired them with a certain exuberance that fueled much of the creative innovation that followed in the arts, politics, philosophy, you name it.  

The Greeks of the classical period and later saw the Persian Wars as a fight for freedom against slavery, but also more broadly as a struggle between East and West. That paradigm has been passed down through the centuries, along with a lot of baggage about how we think about ancient Greece and its importance for the modern world. We’re back to the problem I brought up in my very first episode. Up until recently, the mainstream view was that classical Greece was a uniquely advanced civilization, and that the modern West was the direct heir to that exceptionality. And that perpetuated a sense of superiority over foreign cultures. The historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones addresses this in the introduction to his book Persians: The Age of the Great Kings. Quote: 

What has emerged from this long legacy of imperial philhellenism is a series of damaging premises and a harmful conclusion — that classical Greece was an exceptional moment in world history and that the West has unquestionably benefited from being the heir to Greek culture… Westerners saw themselves as the direct heirs of the miracle of Greek civilization. It was logical for them to thereby affirm that western culture must be exceptional too… The old Greek image of a decadent and despotic Persia was repurposed to represent the inadequacies and inabilities of all non-Europeans. Unquote 

In the last few decades, there’s been a heightened awareness that much of European history has been a history of colonization, with all the human suffering that it’s so often caused. Western civilization has become a sensitive topic, and many people today argue that it’s nothing more than a social construct, that it doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense. I don’t believe in Western superiority. But that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as Western culture. Whatever judgments we make about our past, we have a shared heritage of art, literature, political thought, and much more that we’ve inherited from classical Greece. There are still a lot of people out there who think ancient Greece teaches us that we Westerners are superior. For me, its value is in helping us understand why we are the way we are.

Did the Persian Wars save Greek and by extension western culture? A lot of people would say they absolutely did. But it’s a complicated question. Llewellyn-Jones points out many of the flaws in that view. I don’t think a Persian victory would necessarily have crushed Hellenism. The Persian Empire didn’t normally impose its culture on subject peoples. As long as you paid your taxes, did military service, and didn’t rebel, you could still worship your own gods and conduct business as usual. But the more I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to lean more toward the view if the Persians had conquered Athens, especially in the second invasion, they might have dealt with it the same way they dealt with Miletus — by killing as many of the men as they could and making slaves of everyone else. If that had happened, there probably never would have been a Sophocles, a Euripides, an Aristophanes, a Thucydides, or a Plato. If that were the case, the western world would certainly look very different today.

Enough introduction. Let’s return to mainland Greece in the year 494 BCE. After the destruction of Miletus and the end of the Ionian revolt, everyone knew that the Persians were expanding westward. A confrontation was coming. The political situation in Greek states was both tense and complicated. The overriding question everywhere was: should we try to stand up to the vast power and resources of the Persian Empire? Or should we submit to Persian rule and hope to save our own skins? If we zoom in on Athens, we can explore the situation by looking at two individuals who came to prominence at this time. 

The first of those is Miltiades, a member of the Philaid clan, one of the most influential noble families. We met him in an earlier episode, because he was the one who supposedly urged the other Greek leaders to destroy the bridge over the Danube and leave Darius and his Persian army stranded in Scythia. At that time, Miltiades was a kind of strongman in the Thracian Chersonese, that long strip of land on the north side of the Hellespont, now known as the Gallipoli peninsula. His position there was kind of a family legacy. His uncle, another Miltiades, had gone out to take control of that region during the reign of the tyrant Pisistratus. It was probably a way that Pisistratus could get a potential troublemaker out of the way, while Miltiades would get to be a big shot in the Chersonese and could look out for Athenian interests there. Not long after his death, the younger Miltiades — the one we’re focusing on today — inherited his position.  

He held it during a very turbulent time. Persia was expanding, and those nomadic Scythian tribes were on the move. At one point he was driven out by Scythian invaders, but he managed to return. He positioned himself as a diehard opponent of the Persians. Maybe he really did press his follow Greeks to destroy Darius’ bridge, or that could have been a story he invented to boost his anti-Persian cred. But he seems to have joined the Ionian Revolt, and after the Persians had stamped it out, their Phoenician fleet came after him. It was a close call. He managed to escape by sea to the island of Imbros, although his son was captured and spent the rest of his life in Persia. Shortly after that narrow escape, Miltiades returned to Athens. 

His reception when he came home shows just how deeply divided Athenian sympathies were. On one level, he was a hero who’d stood up against the Persian Empire and done good things for Athens. On the other hand, his position in the Chersonese had been a legacy of the Pisistratid tyrants. He himself had essentially ruled as a tyrant there. So, soon after his return, he was put on trial for tyranny. This is a great example of how nebulous Athenian law was at the time. Was there a law against reigning as a tyrant in another territory? Probably not in any concrete sense. Still, he was tried — but acquitted. We don’t have any solid details, but it’s reasonable to think he and his supporters represented him as an asset to Athens, someone who had direct experience with the Persians and would be valuable in a future confrontation.

So that’s Miltiades. The other figure who comes onto the political stage at this time is Themistocles. His rise is remarkable because, even though he came from a noble family, it wasn’t a particularly distinguished one. He didn’t come from the A-list nobles like the Alcmaeonids or the Philaids. His mother was not even Athenian, although different authors give different accounts of her origin. Unlike so many of the aristocratic families we’ve seen jockeying for power, Themistocles’ family seems to have kept a low public profile. Plutarch tells an anecdote about how Themistocles’ father Neocles tried to persuade him not to pursue a political career. The two were walking along the shore one day and passed by some old ships that were no longer in use, just sitting on the beach and rotting. Neocles pointed them out and said, “You see those old, abandoned ships there? That’s how the Athenians treat their leaders when they no longer have any use for them.” 

But Themistocles was hard-wired for political ambition. He was a climber. He hadn’t inherited a lot of important connections, so he set out to make them. And he became an expert schmoozer. We’re told that he knew every citizen by name. We’ve all known people like that, right? People who make that extra effort to remember names and make other people feel seen. And that was especially important in the developing democracy, where most of the citizens were just ordinary people. Instead of living out on a country estate, he lived inside the city, in the ceramicus, the potter’s quarter. It wasn’t a fashionable neighborhood, but it was close to the agora and the Pnyx, where the assembly met. Plutarch tells us that as a young man, he invited one of the most popular musicians of the time, Epicles of Hermione, to practice at his house, as a way of attracting visitors and raising his profile. 

One way he made himself popular with the people was by offering legal aid to those who needed it. Some modern books say he became a lawyer, which is misleading. Ancient Athens didn’t have lawyers in the modern sense. But he could offer his services as an arbiter to help settle disputes, which then, as today, was often preferable to going to trial. And the more people he could help in that way, the more political support he could count on.  

In this early phase of Themistocles’ career, he must have done a lot more that the ancient sources don’t tell us about. The historian Peter Green speculates that he eased Athenian fears about the grain supply from the Black Sea by opening up markets in Sicily and southern Italy. It’s an attractive theory. We don’t really know. But however he did it, he gained enough popularity that at the age of 30, as soon as he was eligible, he got elected to the chief archonship. This was just the start of a brilliant career. Themistocles will play a much bigger role in later episodes. But his election to the archonship is another indication of how complicated the political situation was, because just a couple of years before, that office went to Hipparchus, a member of the Pisistratid family, which was cozy with the Persians. Themistocles, at least in this part of his career, seems to have always positioned himself as anti-Persian. 

That division between anti-Persian and pro-appeasement factions was not limited to Athens. All of Greece had to face that dilemma. In 491, Darius sent messengers out to various Greek cities demanding earth and water as tokens of submission. Herodotus tells us that many of the mainland cities and the islands surrendered then and there. We’ll talk about the Athenian and Spartan responses in the next section. But one of the islands that wanted to cut a deal with the Persians was Aegina, in the Saronic Gulf, just a short sail from Athens. You may remember this incident from the episode on King Cleomenes of Sparta. Cleomenes went to Aegina to arrest those who had medized, but his co-king Demaratus undercut his efforts. Back in Sparta, Cleomenes then contrived to have Demaratus deposed and exiled. After which he went back to Aegina with a bigger force and a more compliant co-king, took hostages, and handed them over to Athens to keep the Aeginetans from making any more deals with Persia. 

So, to put it mildly, it was an anxious time for Greece. After a break, we’ll look at what the Persians were doing that made things so tense for the Greek states. Since I said “break,” that means it’s time for my usual reminder that Epic Greek history remains free and ad-free. But I’d like to give a shout-out to my newest supporter, Paul Zeitz. Paul is a mathematician, an emeritus professor, and author of the highly acclaimed book “The Art and Craft of Problem Solving.” If you’d like to follow Paul’s lead and help with the cost of production, the one way to do that is to go to the website, www.epicgreekhistory.com, click on that “Support” button, and choose a contribution level starting at just three dollars a month. And with that, we’re on to…

[SFX: A Moment of Greek!] 

Today I’m offering a two-for-one special: a moment of Greek and a bonus moment of Latin. I started this episode talking about how the Greeks framed the Persian Wars as East versus West. The ancient Greek word for “east” is anatolé, but the literal meaning of it is “rise.” The sun rises in the east, so the word for “rising” becomes the word for the east. Likewise, dysis literally means “sinking” or “setting,” and so it comes to mean the west, where the sun sets. Latin does exactly the same thing. “Oriens” means “rising,” and “occidens” means setting… And of course, from those, we get our words “oriental” and “occidental.” English has squeezed more meaning out of “oriens” so that if I’m “oriented,” I literally know which way is east, and I can find my way around. And that’s today’s moment of Greek. And Latin. 

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Now that we’ve looked in on Athens, let’s shift our focus to the east and see what see what the Persians were up to. After putting down the Ionian Revolt, they reestablished their control over Thrace and continued their expansion to the west. The general in charge of operations there was a young noble named Mardonius, the son of Gobryas, who was one of the original conspirators who’d helped Darius get into power. Mardonius was also Darius’ son-in-law. The Achaemenid rulers didn’t shy away from nepotism. Mardonius had been the one to settle things in the Ionian cities after the revolt, setting up the democracies that replaced the puppet tyrannies. Evidently he proved himself to be very competent there, and Darius then gave him the command of operations in the west. 

Herodotus tells us plainly that the objective of Mardonius’ campaign was to punish Athens and Eretria for their involvement in the destruction of Sardis, and to enslave as many Greek cities as possible. Which may be a fair assessment, although we don’t really know what the Persian plans were at this point. It’s important to remember that we’re looking at it from the Greek viewpoint. When you read Herodotus, you could easily get the impression that Darius’ whole focus was on punishing Athens and annexing Greece. But Darius had a vast empire to run. He had bigger issues that just Greece to deal with. Were the Egyptians going to revolt? Were the Scythians going to invade? Which satrapies weren’t paying their full tribute? For Persia, the Greeks were a troublesome, quarrelsome collection of states just beyond their borders. But to the Greeks themselves, and especially the Athenians, it must have felt like they were all Darius ever thought about. It’s no wonder the legend arose that Darius appointed a slave to remind him every night at dinner, “Remember the Athenians.” 

Well, Mardonius’ campaign was very successful at first. He easily took the wealthy island of Thasos up in the north Aegean and secured Persian control of Thrace, then pushed westward to Macedonia. The king of that region was a certain Alexander, whose name may ring a bell, but of course we’re still a few generations before Alexander the Great. This king you might call Alexander the Pragmatic. He decided his best option was to hand over the ceremonial earth and water and become a client ruler. So now Macedonia was a province of the Persian Empire. And that meant Persian territory extended almost to Mount Olympus in northern Greece.

Mardonius must have been feeling pretty good about all this, but then a couple of things happened to slow his roll. His fleet had progressed as far west as the Chalcidice — which Merriam-Webster says I should pronounce “Kal-SI-di-see,” but I can’t bring myself to do that. If you look at a map, the Chalcidice is a big peninsula extending south into the Aegean, and from that peninsula, there are three long, finger-like extensions running farther south. Well, in order to keep moving west, the fleet had to sail around the Chalcidice, which meant first getting around Mount Athos at the tip of that first finger. Those are treacherous waters to begin with, and violent storms can develop very quickly in the Aegean. I can attest to that from personal experience, because I was once on a ferryboat heading back to Athens from Santorini, when a sudden squall forced us to find a port on the island of Ios and wait it out for the next 24 hours. Well, one of those storms came up just as the fleet was trying to round Mount Athos and smashed a good part of it against the rocks. According to Herodotus, 300 ships were destroyed and 20,000 men killed. Herodotus is notorious for reporting inflated numbers, but even if the figures weren’t that high, it was a serious loss. 

If that wasn’t bad enough, while Mardonius was camped with his army in Macedonia, a Thracian tribe called the Byrgoi made a surprise attack and killed many of the Persian soldiers. Mardonius himself was seriously wounded. It wasn’t a total disaster for the Persians. They managed to fight off the Byrgoi and hold onto their territory in Macedonia and Thrace. But after restoring order, Mardonius returned to Asia. And that was the end of his campaign.

Well, Darius wasn’t going to let the loss of a few ships and soldiers stop him. Over the next year, he had his shipyards working overtime to crank out new ships, including transports for horses, because for the next campaign, he was going to send cavalry. It was during this time that he sent out those heralds to demand earth and water from the Greek cities. As we’ve seen, many of them complied. But not Athens, and not Sparta. At Athens, the Persian heralds were thrown into a pit that was used for condemned criminals. At Sparta, they were thrown down a well. And of course, Herodotus gives us one of those badass Spartan wisecracks to accompany the action. As they threw the heralds down the well, they said, “You can take your earth and water from there!”

This was a serious breach of not only protocol, but religious taboos. Heralds were considered sacrosanct. Even if they represented an enemy, they were not to be harmed. Summarily executing them was an offense against the gods. Herodotus tells us that at Sparta, the killing of the heralds incurred the wrath of Talthybius, the herald of Agamemnon, who later had to be propitiated by the death of a couple of Spartans. And he at least raises the question whether Athens’ later misfortunes were divine payback for the death of the Persian messengers.

That was in 491 BCE. By the summer of 490, the invasion force was ready. Mardonius would not be in command this time. Maybe he was still recovering from the wounds he’d received in Macedonia, or maybe Darius had doubts about his competence. In any case, this new expedition would have two commanders. One was Artaphernes, the son of that Artaphernes who had served as the satrap at Sardis. His colleague was a Mede by the name of Datis. And those two commanders would take with them the now 80-year-old Hippias, the exiled tyrant, with the aim of restoring him to power in Athens and making him a vassal of the Great King. 

The fleet set sail from Cilicia, in what’s now southern Turkey, facing Cyprus. They sailed up the coast to Ionia, but this time there was no question of following the coast all the way around and facing another possible disaster off Mount Athos. This time they were going to island hop across the Aegean. On the way, they captured and sacked Naxos, which had withstood the siege nearly ten years earlier, when Aristagoras had led a Persian force against it. One function of that operation was to send a message to the other islands. If you try to resist Persian power, you’re in for a world of hurt. The destruction of Naxos sent the inhabitants of nearby Delos into a panic. But there, Datis undertook a hearts and minds initiative. Delos was sacred to Apollo and Artemis, and Datis promised that he’d never harm the island where those two gods were born. And he made a show of having an enormous quantity of incense burned on the altar of Apollo.

The message was received, and the Persians encountered little or no resistance as they sailed on, claiming one island after another. When an island submitted, it had to provide soldiers for the expedition. And in case you’re thinking those conscripts would just defect to their fellow Greeks the first chance they got, the Persians took their children as hostages to keep them in line.  

At last the fleet reached Euboea, the long, narrow island that runs parallel to the coast of central Greece. At the southern tip of Euboea was a small town by the name of Carystus, which showed an impressive level of courage, because when the Persians arrived, the leaders told them, “Sorry, we’re not joining your army and we’re not giving you any hostages.” So the Persians put their city under siege and ravaged all the farmland around it. Ultimately, the people of Carystus had no choice, and all they could do was surrender and join the Persians. This is a relatively minor incident on this expedition, but I wanted to include it, because Carystus will pop up again in a later episode. 

The Persians then sailed up the straits between Euboea and the mainland. Their first objective was the city of Eretria, which had sent five ships along with the Athenian force that had attacked Sardis in the Ionian revolt. The Eretrians, of course, appealed to Athens for help. The Athenians said they could have the services of the 4000 Athenian cleruchs, that is, settlers on land they’d taken from Eretria’s neighbor Chalcis in an earlier conflict. The problem was that the Eretrians were deeply divided over whether they should fight it out or capitulate. And some of the nobles were ready to sell out the city in the hope of a good payday from the Persians. 

The story we get in Herodotus is that those Athenian cleruchs were all ready to help, but one of the leading Eretrians told them, “It’s hopeless. The traitors are just waiting to hand the city over. Get out and save yourselves.” That sounds a lot like a story the Athenians would tell to save face and keep from looking like they’d abandoned their ally. In any case, those Athenian cleruchs headed for Athens. The Persians besieged Eretria, but they didn’t have to wait long before a couple of noblemen did in fact turn it over to them. The city was sacked, and those who weren’t killed were enslaved. 

Once the Persians had taken care of Eretria, Attica was just across the strait. The old tyrant Hippias knew the territory well, and he could guide them to a good, open plain where they’d be able to make camp, deploy their troops, and use their cavalry effectively. It was a place where, over a half a century earlier, his father Pisistratus had landed when he returned from exile to reclaim power. A place called Marathon.

Now there’s an act break if ever I saw one. The battle is about to begin. But first… 

[SFX: Random Facts!] 

Let’s return for a moment to Mount Athos. It was known throughout antiquity as an especially scary place to sail. Since Byzantine times, it’s been known mainly as an important center of Greek Orthodox monasticism. The Athos peninsula is an autonomous monastic community within Greece, containing 20 main monasteries plus smaller units. Probably the best-known fact about Mount Athos, or the holy mountain as it’s often called, is that women are absolutely forbidden to enter. A story that made the newspapers in the last century claimed that a certain Μιχαήλ Τολότος was brought up by the monks after his mother died in childbirth, so that he lived from 1855 to 1938 without ever seeing a woman. If Herodotus were alive today, I’m sure he’d be saying, “That’s my kind of story!” And that’s today’s random fact. 

[SFX]

When reports came in from Eretria, the Athenians were on high alert. One of the first things they did was to send a messenger to Sparta to plead for help. The man they sent was an athlete by the name of Pheidippides — maybe. The manuscripts of Herodotus fall into two main groups. One group gives his name as Pheidippides; the other gives Philippides, which is a much more common name. The only other Pheidippides I know of is a character in one of Aristophanes’ comedies. Most modern commentators seem to prefer the tried-and-true name, but no one really knows, and I like Pheidippides, so that’s what I’m going to call him. Pheidippides started out before dawn and ran about 140 miles — or 225 kilometers — to arrive in Sparta late the next day. Which sounds like an exaggeration, but modern distance runners have proven that it could be done. 

As soon as he arrived, he asked for immediate help, emphasizing that Eretria had fallen and Athens would be next. The Spartans said they were willing to send aid, but a law prevented them from setting out before the full moon, which was about a week away. Why wait for the full moon? The most widely accepted explanation for that is that this happened during the month when the Spartans celebrated the Carneia, a very important festival of Apollo. To modern ears, it may sound like they were trying to weasel out of a commitment, but these religious laws were taken very seriously. And Sparta did send a force of 2000 hoplites as soon as the rules allowed. But the Athenians would have to wait. 

A famous detail of Pheidippides’ run is that on his way to Sparta, as he was passing through Arcadia, he had a vision of Pan, the goat-footed god of the fields and woods. He addressed Pheidippides and said, “Why do the Athenians neglect my worship? I’ve often helped them, even though they may not have known it.” Inevitably, there’s been a lot of speculation about that story. Historians have often suggested he had a hallucination brought on by exhaustion and lack of sleep. One professor from my grad school days liked to say he experienced a “runner’s high.” Whatever the case, he reported his vision at home, and sometime after the emergency had passed, the Athenians established a shrine to Pan at the foot of the Acropolis.

Now, as we get into the battle itself, I want to make it clear that most of what I’ll say is tentative. The battle of Marathon is not well understood, and just about every detail is debated. Our best ancient account comes from Herodotus, who leaves out a lot of information we’d like to have. So what I’m going to present is a reconstruction based on the ways various historians have interpreted the evidence. 

The plain of Marathon is on the attic coast, at a big bay that’s oriented northeast to southwest. At the northeast end, at least in 490 BCE, there were extensive marshes, and east of those was a long, narrow promontory called the Dog’s Tail. Which is just what it looks like if you see it on a map. The majority of historians think the Persians hauled up their ships and made camp in a broad area between those marshes and the Dog’s Tail. Once they were there, the cavalry could patrol and do reconnaissance over the plain. 

Now, Herodotus makes it sound like the Persians landed, the Athenians immediately rushed down to the plain, and then they debated how they were going to handle the situation. I think it’s very unlikely that it happened that way. They had plenty of advance warning that trouble was coming, and they must have had extensive debates in the assembly before the moment of crisis. The two main choices were to march down to Marathon and fight a battle against formidable odds or to stay inside the city walls and try to fend off a siege. One important consideration was that there were factions in the city who wanted to appease the Persians and take Hippias back as their tyrant. Ultimately, it was probably Miltiades who persuaded the assembly that the best option was to take quick action to contain the beachhead — in other words, to try to block the Persians from advancing inland to the city.

So the army units from all ten Athenian tribes marched to Marathon. Each tribe had its own general, and Miltiades was one of those. The commander in chief, so to speak, was the polemarch, the war archon, a man named Callimachus. All told, there were probably about 10,000 Athenian hoplites to face a force of 20,000 or more Persians. With the Persians camped at the northeast end of the plain, the Athenians took up a position in a protected spot at the southwest end, in a sanctuary of Heracles. From there, they could block the main road to Athens. The Spartans were still busy celebrating their festival of Apollo, but the Athenians did get a few hundred more hoplites from the town of Plateia up north in Boeotia. Athens had helped Plateia in an earlier conflict with Thebes, so the Plateians were now returning the favor. 

For the next several days, no one made a move. The Athenians were naturally cautious about fighting a pitched battle on the open plain, because they were severely outnumbered and they didn’t have cavalry to oppose the Persian mounted troops. They could also hold out hope that if they waited long enough, reinforcements would arrive from Sparta. Why didn’t the Persians just march ahead and attack the Athenian camp? Well, the Athenians were in a protected position where the superior Persian numbers wouldn’t be such a great advantage, and the Persian infantry didn’t have the kind of protective armor that the Greek hoplites had. They could also hope that they wouldn’t even have to fight if their sympathizers in Athens would hand over the city to them.  

But ultimately, the Athenians decided their only chance was to risk an infantry battle. Herodotus has Miltiades give an impassioned speech to the polemarch Callimachus, saying either we fight for our freedom now or all is lost. That’s a dramatization, but Miltiades probably was a driving force in the decision to fight and in the organization of the troops. One curious thing about Herodotus’ account is that, after all the handwringing about Persian cavalry, no cavalry appears in his narrative of the battle. He doesn’t say something happened to it. It just isn’t there. It’s like a bad screenplay where a gun appears in Act 1 and then it never goes off. The Suda gives us a possible clue as to what happened. It reports that some Ionians serving in the Persian army climbed up into trees and signaled to the Athenian camp, “Cavalry away.” Historians have offered different opinions on whether the cavalry really was away, and if so, why. 

If the Athenians did get information that the Persian cavalry was absent, that would certainly have been the time to strike. Others have argued that the Persians must have made the first move, and the Athenians were forced to go out and face them. Whatever the case, the armies took up positions about a mile apart. And this is where a decision about the configuration of the Greek troops made all the difference. A crucial consideration in a hoplite phalanx is that your line has to be at least equal in length to that of the opposing army. Otherwise, you’re going to get outflanked, and you’ll be vulnerable to attack from the sides. So if you’re outnumbered, as the Athenians certainly were, you have to sacrifice some depth for length. A standard phalanx was eight ranks deep, so they’d have to take some men from those ranks to make the line long enough.  

The Athenian solution was to deliberately leave the central part of their phalanx weak and to make the wings as strong as possible. That was especially risky for those hoplites in the center, because that was where the Persians placed their elite infantry. On the Athenian side, Callimachus as the polemarch had the position of honor on the right wing. The reinforcements from Plateia were placed at the far left. Herodotus doesn’t tell us explicitly where Miltiades stood, but judging from the way the tribal regiments were positioned, he would have been in the center, the section that was intentionally the weakest. Themistocles also had his place in the center, as did Aristides, who would later be one of Themistocles’ main political rivals. So three of the most important individuals in the history of Athens were in that very vulnerable position, in a thin part of the phalanx facing the best of the Persian troops. 

To the amazement of the Persians, the Greek forces started an aggressive advance, charging at a run. According to some accounts, they ran the whole mile, but I doubt they would have wasted the energy to run that distance while weighed down with hoplite armor and shields. My guess is that they started running as soon as they were within bowshot, so that they’d get through the barrage of Persian arrows as quickly as possible and take the enemy on in hand-to-hand combat. Well, just as they expected, the central part of the line got the worst of it. They were slowly being driven back, and their task was to hold the line as long as possible without breaking. On the wings, things went as the Athenians had hoped. They were at full strength, they fought aggressively, and ultimately the Persian forces broke and ran. As soon as that happened, the wings on the Athenian side wheeled around and joined their comrades in the center. 

That turned the tide of the battle. Those elite Persian troops were overwhelmed by the better armed hoplites. Their line broke, and the Athenians chased them as they fled to their camp. In the disorder, many of the Persians got caught in those marshes, where they were easily cut down. The Athenians pursued them as far as their camp, where they were frantically trying to board their ships and get out to sea. Most of the ships got away, but the Athenians captured seven of them. There were, of course, casualties on the Athenian side too. The polemarch Callimachus was killed. And we have the gory detail that an Athenian named Cynegirus, who was the brother of the tragic playwright Aeschylus, grabbed the stern a ship he was trying to capture when he got his hand cut off with an axe. 

Herodotus gives us casualty figures from the battlefield, and in this case his numbers seem to be pretty reliable. The Athenians lost 192 men. Persian deaths amounted to 6,400. Still, about two-thirds of the Persians made it back to their ships and put out to sea.

But the Athenians couldn’t start popping champagne corks just yet. As soon as the Persian ships had set sail, someone on one of the mountains in Attica sent them a signal by reflecting the sun from a highly polished shield. The Athenian troops knew that had to mean some pro-Persian faction was ready to hand the city over. The Persians, then, would be on their way to the bay of Phaleron, where’d have a clear path up to Athens. So the Athenian army, having just fought a grueling battle on the plain of Marathon, marched 26 miles on the double, back to the city. In record time, they made it to the Athenian deme of Cynosarges, overlooking Phaleron. When the Persian fleet arrived, there was the full force of the Athenian army standing at the ready. The fleet stayed at anchor for a little while, presumably to let the last of the ships catch up to them, and then sailed off back to Asia. 

Two days later, 2000 Spartans showed up. They were too late to take part in the fight, but they asked to be shown around the battlefield. In Herodotus’ telling, they showed none of the stereotypical Spartan arrogance. They were impressed and congratulated the Athenians for what they’d done. The battle didn’t end the conflict with Persia by any means, but it did a lot to shatter the illusion of Persian invincibility. This was the first time that many mainland Greeks had seen Persians up close and faced them in battle. It showed that they could win a decisive victory even over vastly superior numbers. It demythologized the Persians and turned them into human rather than superhuman enemies.

In Athens, the battle of Marathon was celebrated beyond anything else in their history. The 192 fallen Athenians received the very rare honor of being buried on the battlefield where they’d given their lives. A huge mound was built over them, and it’s still there today. It’s not at the top of the list of tourist attractions, but if you’re an ancient history buff, you can see where the warriors of Marathon are buried. The Persian dead, of course, received no such honor. Their bodies were dumped into an unmarked mass grave and were lost to history until a 19th-century German surveying team discovered a great mass of bones which could only be the Persians from Marathon. 

Later generations of Athenians exalted the Marathonomachoi, the fighters of Marathon, in something like the way the Americans of World War II have been idolized in my lifetime — but cranked up to eleven! As time went on, and especially as newer political and social trends developed, they came to be emblematic of old-fashioned, bedrock Athenian values. To illustrate the point, when the tragedian Aeschylus died, in accordance with his wishes, his tombstone recorded that he had fought at Marathon. There was no mention of his achievements in drama.  

Finally, a postscript. The modern marathon run takes its name from ancient Marathon, and the distance of 26.2 miles is based on the distance from the battlefield to Athens. It commemorates a legend that grew up some time after Herodotus. Plutarch told a story that a messenger by the name of Thersippos ran from Marathon to Athens to announce the victory, then died on the spot. In the second century CE, the satirist Lucian told essentially the same story, but he said the runner was named Philippides. You can see how the stories are merging. In 1879, Robert Browning told the fully conflated story in a poem called “Pheidippides.” In his version, Pheidippides runs to Sparta, has his vision of Pan, runs back to Athens to fight in the battle, then runs to Athens and announces, “Rejoice! We conquer!” — and then dies of exhaustion.  

So ends the popular legend, and so ends episode 32. As I said, my account of the battle is as close as I can come to a mainstream version. Historians disagree about even major parts of the narrative such as where the Persians and Athenians had their camps. Some argue that the Persian cavalry was there all along. Some don’t believe a shield signal was ever sent. If you want to dig deeper, I’d recommend a book called The Defence of Greece 490-479 BC by J.L. Lazenby He has his own axes to grind, but he gives good summaries of different opinions. As always, if you’d like to make a comment, ask a question, or set me straight about something, please get in touch. You can send me an email at scott@epicgreekhistory.com or just leave a comment on my Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and produced by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, ευτυχεĩτε! Be well.