Once the initial damage was done, they would set aside their bows, take up their shields, and charge forward with their spears, hurling them at short range. After this second wave of killing was unleashed, they would finish the job with their hacking swords in hand-to-hand combat.
The other important component of the Persian armament was their cavalry. The Persians bred large numbers of horses for use on the battlefield to complement their ground troops. They worked together in concert, and no enemy they faced had ever been able to withstand this concerted attack. Working in this way, they were able to roar through all of western Asia, conquering, destroying, and capturing nation after nation, and in so doing they garnered a reputation of being formidable and supreme warriors, completely unstoppable.
The Greeks feared and revered the Persians, both for their fighting prowess and for certain elements of their culture. Young Persian men were purportedly taught three basic skills in life: to ride a horse, to shoot a bow, and to tell the truth. This simple and righteous upbringing was something the Greeks respected. But they also perceived a subversive element in the authoritative Persian system of governance. Were these young Persians taught to be noble or were they brainwashed into becoming subservient trolls of the government, incapable of independent thought and action? As much as Darius projected the image of a virtuous leader, his actions suggested that of a character far more sinister. After all, he routinely ordered the wholesale slaughter of entire populations. In many respects he was little more than a bloodthirsty murderer.
In 494 BCE Darius decided it was time to roil Greece, and his initial invasions were devastatingly successful. The Persians handily sacked the Grecian city-state of Ionia, ruthlessly destroying divine sanctuaries and laying much of the Ionian landscape to ruin. The young Ionian boys were castrated, while the young girls were taken captive and turned into pleasure slaves.
Once in control of this region, the Persians used Ionia as a staging ground to strengthen and fortify their military presence, eventually amassing a huge naval fleet of some 600 trireme warships and tens of thousands of infantry and cavalry. They then set sail for the Greek island of Naxos. When the Naxians saw the magnitude of the military power approaching, they didn’t even bother putting up a fight. Instead, they fled to the hills for safety. The Persians showed no mercy and burned the entire city to the ground, leaving only ashes and ruin in their wake.
Next, the Persians made their way to Eretria. The Eretrian people tried to put up a fight, but they were simply no match. The Persians quickly seized the island and loaded the captured inhabitants onto vessels bound for Asia, where they would face the austere wrath of King Darius.
By all accounts, the Persian campaign to overtake Greece was going splendidly. In 491 BCE Darius sent emissaries to mainland Greece demanding earth and water, the formal tokens of surrender. Most of the Greek city-states realized that they were no match for Darius and bowed in submission. Nobody wanted to see the Persians in control of Greece, but the strength of their military was too daunting an adversary to oppose. The choice was either to capitulate and pray for mercy, or attempt to put up a fight and face almost certain death or enslavement. All of the Greek city-states surrendered.
Except for Athens and Sparta. They were not so quick to submit. The idea of giving up their homeland to a foreign tyrant didn’t sit well with them. In a show of solidarity, the Athenians and Spartans entered into a mutual defense pact, or epimachia, vowing to remain united in the face of a Persian attack. When Darius’s emissaries arrived and demanded earth and water from the Spartans, they did something unthinkable. In a brazen act of defiance, they flung the Persian envoys into a well, telling them that if they wanted earth and water, they could find it down there. The Spartans effectively “killed the messenger,” reasoning that the treaties protecting heralds from harm were an ancient Hellenic accord and the Persian butchers should be granted no such quarter.
Needless to say, Darius was none too pleased, to put things mildly. He immediately ordered the Persian fleet to set sail for mainland Greece, and in August of 490 BCE they crossed the Euboean Channel and landed strategically inside the sheltering Kynosoura Peninsula along the northern edge of the sweeping Bay of Marathon. Here they established a massive encampment and set the stage for the greatest military battle the world had yet to see.
Coming ashore where they had was by no means coincidental. Their landing spot offered a large degree of tactical flexibility along with easy access and egress. The broad coastal plains of Marathon were ideally suited to the deployment of the superior Persian numbers while providing ample space for their cavalry to maneuver. The bay was well protected from the prevailing etesian winds, and unlike much of the rocky and treacherous coastline of Greece, this landing area offered a gentler shoreline. From Marathon, they could either fight a land battle or set out around Cape Sounion and the Attic Peninsula and launch a seaborne attack.
How did they possibly know to choose this particular spot? It turns out they had some help. An ex-autocrat by the name of Hippias, who’d been exiled from Greece for his domineering, totalitarian ways, was out to seek retribution. Once defected to Persia, he’d fallen in with Darius and dreamed of one day returning to Greece to avenge his democratic banishers. Cunning and embittered, Hippias apparently had relatives in Athens and maintained a cadre of associates who served as paid informants. These were equally greedy men who would gladly set aside patriotism and allegiance to Greece in exchange for personal advantage and power, which Darius had aptly promised them.
Hippias conferred with Darius and the other leaders of Persia on battle tactics and logistical considerations, and then accompanied the Persian fleet to serve as an advisor along the way. He knew Marathon offered an ideal landing spot, one that was protected from the powerful winds that incessantly whipped down the Aegean, and so he helped guide the massive Persian armada to this precise location. At Marathon the Persians would be able to easily establish a sprawling military encampment, which they promptly did.
Word quickly reached Athens that the Persians had landed, and in terrifying numbers. By some estimates there were upward of 50,000 men, perhaps more. The Athenians were badly outnumbered and they knew it. They needed help. So they dispatched a herald to Sparta to seek reinforcements. Now, Sparta was no short distance—some 140 miles from Athens across rocky and mountainous terrain—but the Athenian herald they sent was one of their finest, Pheidippides. A personal friend of General Miltiades, he was trustworthy and capable, perhaps the greatest hemerodromos Greece had ever known. He would need to execute his mission with exacting precision as the fate of Athens, and perhaps all of Greece, depended on his ability to cover this vast distance as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
Once Pheidippides had departed for Sparta, the Athenians debated their options. They had two viable alternatives: They could play defense and man the city walls awaiting their enemy’s arrival, or they could deploy for Marathon and attack the Persians where they stood. Led by the encouragement of General Miltiades, they chose the aggressive move and prepared to depart for Marathon to confront the interlopers head-on.
Miltiades impassioned the Greeks by reminding them that although they were badly outnumbered—perhaps five to one against a highly skilled enemy—they had something more meaningful at stake. After all, it was not only their homeland they were defending but also their system of governance, one in which all had equal political participation and voice. Unlike the Persians, who were driven into battle by the whips of their commanders, the Greeks were citizen militia fighting side by side as neighbors and brothers willing to risk everything for a democracy they all equally belonged to. This system of demos sovereignty—self-rule by the people—and political equality (isegoria) gave them something worth fighting for and, if need be, something worth dying for.
This passion was reflected in the participation rates of the military. In an unparalleled showing of civic pride and duty, nearly every single able-bodied male of fighting age join
ed the brigade. The egalitarian nature of the Athenian system made each man feel as though it was his estate under attack and his interest at stake. This was something worth defending, to the death if need be. To the Greeks, the battle was personal.
Before departing, General Miltiades instructed those inhabitants remaining in Athens to direct Pheidippides, upon his return with the Spartans, to Marathon. The women, children, and elderly citizens staying behind in the city agreed to do so.
With the possibility of never returning again looming over them, the Athenian hoplite forces said goodbye to their friends, family, and loved ones and prepared to depart. And on that August day in 490 BCE, they began their march of some 25 miles to the coastal plains of Marathon.
When they arrived, what they found wasn’t a welcoming sight. Scores of Persian warships had already beached upon the water’s edge, and hundreds more waited just offshore. The foreign invaders had long since disembarked, and many men and cavalry were securely established in a position that couldn’t easily be attacked. It was no use trying to drive them back now. The Persians had arrived, and in no small way.
Seeing the disturbing imbalance in sheer numbers and in the quantity of military equipment the Persians possessed, the Greeks decided to hold their position in the foothills of the Pentele mountain range, which overlooked the Bay of Marathon and was well protected above the enemy encampment. Here they would sit in wait for the Spartan reinforcements to arrive. There seemed no way to take on this immense Persian army without Spartan help. Godspeed, Pheidippides. Godspeed.
10
ORIGINS OF A CLASSIC
A student of history, British Royal Air Force Wing Commander John Foden was fascinated with early Greek writings. A prodigious reader, he enjoyed delving into the mysterious yarns and torrid tales of the ancient Greek record and exploring the colorful accounts of pre-Christian Hellenic lore. Such was the stuff that captured his fancy.
Commander Foden also happened to be an avid runner, and in 1978 he completed his first marathon. He found the experience entrancing and began running competitively, eventually going on to win a silver medal in the marathon at the World Masters Athletic Championships in New Zealand in 1980.
This accomplishment spurred a simple inquiry into the meaning of the word marathon. Thumbing through the Encyclopedia Britannica, he came across a rather esoteric reference to The Histories and the writings of Herodotus, the “Father of History,” as he is known. Intrigued, he pulled A. R. Burns’s translation of The Histories, which was published by Penguin Classics in 1970.
As he read through this modern translation of Herodotus’s writings, one excerpt in particular jumped out at him. This passage spoke about the prelude to the Battle of Marathon and stated:
And first, before they left the city, the generals sent off to Sparta a herald, one Pheidippides, who was by birth an Athenian, and by profession and practice a trained runner.
Wait a minute, he thought, the story everyone was familiar with was that of Pheidippides running from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce Greek victory, a distance of 26.2 miles. A run from Athens to Sparta was something altogether different, much more than a single marathon, more like six marathons stacked one upon the other. Such a distance would be appropriately classified as an ultramarathon, not a marathon. Athens to Sparta represented some 140 or more miles; how was it possible that one man could have done this?
What he read next intrigued Foden even more. Herodotus wrote that Pheidippides completed this journey “the day after he set out,” meaning he covered such a distance in under 2 days’ time. Impossible, Foden thought. He dismissed the notion as fantasy.
But his fascination with what he’d read did not fade. Could it be true? Herodotus was also known in some circles as the “Father of Lies.” Was this one such tall tale, or did Pheidippides really run all the way from Athens to Sparta and arrive the day after setting out?
The hook was set.
It wasn’t easy obtaining a formal RAF expedition grant to do what Commander Foden intended to do. In fact, the presiding Physical Education Officer in charge of authorizing such grants thought the whole proposal little more than a harebrained excuse for a holiday in sunny Greece. Thankfully, one of the PhDs on staff was also a runner and took an interest in Foden’s project. He helped usher the funding request through the system, and eventually it got green-lighted to proceed. The expedition was scheduled to commence on October 8, 1982.
Foden was able to successfully recruit a team of RAF companions. In total, there were five runners and six support-crew members to provide assistance along the way. They were all set to go, but the trip didn’t get off to a very smooth start. The flights they’d booked from their station in Germany to Athens got cancelled indefinitely. Being a resourceful lad, Commander Foden hired a minibus to transport the group instead. The long drive to Greece was a harrowing adventure in its own right, as the route passed through what was then Communist-occupied Yugoslavia.
Much of the time they’d set aside for reconnaissance in Greece was eaten up by the lengthy and time-consuming drive, so the run was forced to commence without much advance scouting. With a resplendent sunrise silhouetting the Acropolis in the background, five men set out to prove the stated purpose of the enterprise, that Herodotus’s telling of Pheidippides’s story in The Histories was not a myth.
The men tried their best to follow as close an approximation to Pheidippides’s route as they could using the obscure references made by Herodotus and a modern map, but for necessity of logistics and van support they needed to rely on established roadways for much of the journey. Some of the trails Pheidippides might have followed were now likely paved over, while other sections were covered in thickets and brushy overgrowth, but the group’s intention was to run to Sparta on a route that as closely as possible mimicked the footsteps of this fabled Greek hemerodromos, all the while not having much detailed information on precisely what this route was.
They encountered innumerable challenges along the way. First was the unexpected nightmare of having to deal with car traffic and billowing air pollution along the overcrowded roadways of Athens. Greek drivers were unaccustomed to seeing people running alongside the highway, and very few of them realized how terrifying a swiftly passing vehicle could be to a person who was traveling on foot. The five modern-day hemerodromoi had to contend with dense industrial congestion, belching diesel fumes, and the terrifying blasts of car horns assaulting them from every direction.
On the climb through the shantytowns of Dafini, numerous stray dogs, some of whom appeared rabid, rushed out and snapped at them. The five runners initially stuck together, trying to protect one another and covering each other’s backs. Pheidippides, of course, would have had to fend for himself in such instances.
Eventually, tarmac yielded to old, potholed roads and less heavily trafficked gravel pathways. They ran together as a group for quite some distance, but soon they discovered that athletes undertaking an ultramarathon tend to fall into their own unique rhythms. Periods of high energy and troughs of low energy rarely coincide between two runners. By nightfall the group had split up and become considerably separated, each man running at his own comfortable tempo. This made it increasingly difficult for the support vehicles to provide aid and assistance at consistent intervals.
Perhaps owing to this fact, two of the runners were forced to terminate their efforts along a segment of the Peloponnese coastline. Lacking sustained energy and badly dehydrated, they could no longer continue. This left just three runners on the course, and by morning the following day they had nearly a 60-kilometer spread between them.
Navigating at night and in the gray murk of dawn was tricky. There were more encounters with vicious dogs, and at one point Foden diverted his course to avoid a particular village—out of fear of being attacked by one such creature—and was forced to navigate through freshly plowed fields, his shoes filling with stones and debris. Complicating matters, radio contact between the two s
upport vehicles was lost in the mountains, and their ability to communicate with each other was severed. Each of the runners took different routes, some truer to the landmarks Herodotus described Pheidippides as encountering, while others veered quite a distance from those markers. Their intention had always been to follow as closely as possible in the footsteps of Pheidippides, but they learned that this was nearly impossible to accomplish in practice, especially given their lack of research and reconnaissance beforehand.
Thirty-four and a half hours later, however, the first of the three runners arrived in Sparta. He had followed a nearly direct course and avoided a rather extreme climb up to the summit of a mountaintop, but in circumventing this rather vexing obstacle, he also bypassed one of the clear references Herodotus made in The Histories to Pheidippides being “high above Tegea.”
Commander Foden arrived a bit later, in just under 38 hours of total running time. He had likely run a greater distance than the first arriver and contended with more mountainous terrain, but this was an era prior to the advent of GPS, so neither of them could pinpoint their exact route. The final of the three remaining runners arrived about an hour after Foden.
The expedition culminated in the main square of Sparta, beneath the hulking statue of King Leonidas. Despite dehydration and reports of hallucinations, blisters, horrendous sunburns, and a cumulative weight loss of more than 40 pounds between them, the trio had remarkably completed the journey, and they all did so within 2 days’ time. At last, Herodotus had been vindicated!