The Athens Marathon, Part I

Hello. Welcome to Have Toga, Will Travel, a podcast exploring the Mediterranean world, ancient and modern, through the eyes of two former classics professors. I'm Emily.

I'm Cam.

We're your hosts.

This is our first episode. It's an important episode for us because it's the first that we're recording. And I think what we'd like to do is spend this episode talking about the marathon, the race, but as we'll see also the battle. We're going to structure this discussion in a series of two podcast episodes. This is part one. We'll be talking mostly about the origins of the marathon in antiquity. And then part two, when we come back in a couple of weeks, we'll focus on the race's modern origins and talk in a little bit more detail about our own experiences.

So why did we pick this topic for our first episode? And really, it's been on our mind recently because we just started training again to do the Athens Marathon this fall. We did it for the first time last year, last November. It was the first marathon for both of us.

I should add that we walked. We didn't run. I don't want to give a false impression here. But walking, as it turns out, is pretty challenging in and of itself.

Yes, yes. we walked. If you know me, you know that I for sure, am not a runner. And there was no way that I was going to run a marathon. Although we had at points in time discussed that if we were ever going to do a marathon, it would have to be the Athens marathon, because it's the original marathon. And you know, if you're going to do one, that's the one to do. And somehow this ended up with us actually deciding to do it and doing it. And something kind of funny that happened when we had decided to do the marathon a year ago. And I was talking to some people at work about this. And the way I introduced it was that I said, yes, we've decided to do the original marathon. And someone looked at me and said, Oh, the New York marathon. And I said, No. And someone's like, oh, Boston. No, the original marathon from Marathon to Athens. And everyone just looked at me blankly. And I was a little surprised because this was a room of intelligent, well-educated people, and they didn't actually know the real story behind the marathon as it exists today.

Right. It turns out there's actually an origin story.

There is an origin story. And there's maybe competing origin stories, or there's like legends, and then there's what really happened. So if you know a lead, if you know a founding story for the marathon, right, the legend is, there's a battle that the city state of Athens fights. And they win somewhat unexpectedly. And a runner by the name of Pheidippides goes running back to the city of Athens to announce the victory. He does so and then immediately drops dead from exhaustion. And the Marathon as a race purports to recreate this run from the battle site at a town called Marathon in Athenian territory to the city of Athens itself.

Right. There's a little bit of context here that's probably necessary before we go on. If we think about Athens, what we're thinking about is a city state that controlled a territory known as Attica. If you can imagine an upside down triangle, that gives you roughly a sense of what Attica looked like. Marathon is in the northeast corner of this triangle. Athens itself is in the northwest, separated from Marathon by a line of mountains that runs roughly north to south down the peninsula. At the southern tip, we have Cape Sounion, which has a marvelous temple of Poseidon, if you ever get a chance to go see it. In 490 BC, the Persians landed an army at Marathon in an attempt to overthrow the young Athenian democracy and replace it with the rule of one man, a guy named Hippias, who had in the past been the strong man ruler of Athens before going into exile. They landed at Marathon partly because they hoped to face less resistance there than they would have had they sailed around to Athens itself, and because they hoped that Hippias would be able to drum up a little bit of support so that they could overthrow the democracy without doing too much work.

Now, things do not go to plan for the Persians, and the Athenians managed to muster their forces and march out to Marathon, force a battle there, and win. And this is where the legendary run of Pheidippides comes in, right? This is the battle, unexpected win, running back to the city to announce the victory.

You keep using this word legendary.

I do keep using this word legendary. And it's because we have to ask ourselves, is this story really true? And when we look at it, there are actually reasons to doubt the story of this run that Pheidippides makes. And there's a a few reasons for this. I mean, it's a great story, don't get me wrong. But our sources for this story are fairly late. So when I say late, I mean, these are writers who are writing about 600 years after the Battle of Marathon. And we've got two sources here. One is a writer named Lucian, who's writing in Greek during the Roman Empire in the second century CE. And Lucian tells the classic story. A runner, in this case named Philippides, runs back after the battle, bursts into the council house to say, rejoice, we've won, and then drops dead. So that's one version that we get. We also get some versions, I said plural, versions, in a writer Plutarch, also writing in Greek during the Roman Empire, probably about 50 years earlier than Lucian, so late 1st, early 2nd century. And Plutarch tells us one version, which is that there is a man named Thersippos, who is the first person to get back to Athens to announce the victory marathon. He then goes on to tell a second set of stories, which are closer to the Lucian, in which a man by the name of Euklēs, runs back to announce the victory, and then dies from exhaustion. Now, just because these sources are late doesn't mean that we shouldn't believe them. Because sometimes we can say, well, this source is late, but we can track back that this later writer is relying on an earlier author, earlier stories that are more reliable. In that case, it's hard to do because for the two stories, the one in Lucian and the one in Plutarch where the runner dies, they don't give us any attribution for where they're getting this story from. For the other story about Thersippos that Plutarch also tells, he does give us an attribution. And that's to a writer named Heraclides of Pontus, who's writing in the mid fourth century. Now you'll note in that story, nobody dies. So we've already got a problem there, right? We've got two different versions. The one that is the legend that we know doesn't seem to be well sourced or the sourcing is unclear. And the one that is sourced back to a much older source does not have the dying in it. And on top of that, all three different versions of the story, the two in Plutarch, the one in Lucian, the runner has a different name in each version. So it's clear that there's a lot of legend developed that has happened over the years. And it's really hard to say which version is accurate.

If any.

If any. And even the one, the Thersippos story that can get traced back to this fourth century writer, we're still looking at someone who was writing about 150 years after the Battle of Marathon. Now, it just so happens that we do have a writer who was writing during a time when Marathon still was within living memory.

Right. That writer is Herodotus. We should probably say a few words about Herodotus since he's such a major figure. The short version is that Herodotus was an intellectual from Halicarnassus, a Greek city-state on the southwestern coast of what is now Turkey. He's known today usually as the father of history, mostly because his work is the first surviving text that really engages in some good historical analysis. Herodotus is telling the story of conflicts between the Persian empire and the Greek world between about 550 BC and 480 BC. But in addition to telling the story, he's actually doing the work of trying to understand what the story means. Now, among other things, he talks at some length about the campaign and battle of Marathon. But one of the things he doesn't talk about is a run from Marathon to Athens by Pheidippides or Philippides or Thersipos or Euklēs or anybody else. That omission is a little bit surprising because Herodotus, if nothing else, loved a good story.

Yes, he really did. He really does. He'll even tell the story if he thinks it's not true.

Right. Which he does on several occasions. He'll introduce a story, sort of hedge a little bit by saying, I'm not entirely sure I believe this and include it anyway. So the fact that he doesn't tell a story about a run from Marathon to Athens, again, it's really striking in this context, especially because he does have a story about a different kind of run tied to the battle at Marathon. The story he tells us is a story about a runner, usually called Pheidippides, who, right after the Persians landed at Marathon, was sent by the Athenians to Sparta to ask for Spartan help. Pheidippides had to run about 150 miles to get to Sparta over some pretty rough paths. We're told that he made it the day after he set out by Athens. He delivered his requests. The Spartans said, well, we'd love to come and help, but we can't set out from Sparta until the full moon, probably because a religious ritual got in the way. Now, the thing is, Herodotus, among other things, uses this story about Pheidippides' run from Athens to Sparta to slip in another really interesting detail. And that's a sub story about Pheidippides' epiphany along the route.

Epiphany in this case is not like his brilliant idea, but rather is this manifestation of a god that he encounters.

And who among us has not had a weird experience in Athens that we've attributed to the epiphany of a god? It happens all the time.

Yeah.

Anyway, Herodotus uses this story to go on a digression about Pheidippides encountering the god Pan in the wilderness, not too far north of Sparta. Pan complains that the Athenians have not been paying enough attention to him. So Pheidippides, when he gets back to Athens, delivers that complaint to the Athenians, and they resolve to solve that problem by holding celebrations in Pan's honor. And this is just sort of an example of the way that Herodotus will throw in these interesting stories, even when they're not directly related to the plot. So it's really difficult to imagine why, if he knew about a story of a runner running from Marathon to Athens, bursting into the council house to deliver news and dying, he would not have included it, just because it is so interesting.

Yeah, it's the exact kind of story that Herodotus would tell. And so, yeah, it seems unlikely that had this happened, Herodotus wouldn't have told about it. And so the fact that he doesn't tell us about it seems to indicate that this is probably a later legend that develops around the Battle of Marathon. And that raises the question, well, if the story of this run isn't true, why does it come about? And there I think the answer really involves turning and looking at the Battle of Marathon and its significance. Because the Battle of Marathon becomes incredibly fertile ground in its own time for the creation of new legends. And there's really three big reasons why Marathon becomes so important. One, for the Athenians, Marathon is a battle against huge odds. It is a true David and Goliath fight for the Athenians. Two, on top of that, Marathon is an existential battle for the Athenians. And three, Marathon was a battle that the Athenians win more or less on their own. And we're going to talk about all of these reasons a little bit more. But those are the big sort of three reasons that lead to Marathon being such fertile ground for the development of legends.

Right. So let's break this down a little bit. And let's start with the point that this was a battle against overwhelming odds. In 490 BCE, Athens was one of several hundred Greek city-states that made up what we think of as the ancient Greek world. It was one of the bigger city-states, but in relative senses, it was pretty small. At most, its citizen-male manpower was about 30,000 people, and only about a third of them could afford the kind of armor and weapons they would have needed to fight as frontline infantry in a battle. On top of that, the Athenians, like most other Greeks, did not have a professional military force. The army, such as it was, was a militia army. All male citizens in time of war were expected to serve the state. They did that bravely. They didn't have a lot of training, especially when it came to marching around long distances and staying together on the battlefield and things like that.

On the other side of this fight, you have the Persian Empire. The Persian Empire, at this point in time, is arguably the largest empire the world had seen to that point. It stretched all the way from the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan, all the way to the western coast of what is now Turkey, what we would call in antiquity Anatolia. So all the way to the Aegean Sea. This is huge. It encompasses a population of millions of people. And the army that would have landed at Marathon would have represented some of the diversity of the Persian Empire, albeit the army that lands is an expeditionary force. So it's not the full force of the Persian army, but it still would have been substantially larger than what Athens could field. And that army is going to include conscripts from Greek city-states along the west coast of Anatolia and conscripts from the islands of the Aegean that the Persian fleet would have sailed through to get to Athens. However, the core of the Persian army would have been made up of Persians. And here we're thinking about something that is more like a semi-professional army at its core. So the Persians are larger, they have more manpower, and they are better trained than the Athenian forces.

So not only is this a battle against overwhelming odds for the Athenians, it's also a battle in which the stakes really are existential. The ruler of the Persian Empire, Darius, had launched the whole expedition because from his perspective, the Athenians were rebels who needed to be punished. There's a bit of a backstory here. The very short version is that 16 or 17 years before the battle, let's say 507 BC, the Athenians, having just established their democracy, were desperately in need of powerful friends and allies because they feared attack from some of their neighbors. So the Athenians sent ambassadors to the strongest power in the world, the Persian Empire, to ask for help. Herodotus tells us that the Athenian ambassadors showed up in a place called Sardis in what is now Western Turkey—at that point, the Persian administrative capital in the western Empire. There they had a conversation with Darius's brother, Artaphernes, and they asked for an alliance. Artaphernes responded basically by pointing out that the Persians didn't do alliances. They extended protection.

Nothing gangster about that.

Nothing gangster about it at all. And he told the Athenians that he was perfectly happy to extend the protection of the Persians to them, if only they would submit themselves to Darius and recognize Darius's supremacy. The Athenians, put in a bit of a bind, did this, and so from the Persian perspective, they became subjects of the Persian Empire. This got them into trouble pretty quickly. A few years later, in 499, a whole bunch of Greek city-states on the western coast of Anatolia that were subject to the Persian Empire rose up in revolt. The Athenians sent help, and the force they sent participated in the sack of Sardis, the administrative capital in the western Persian Empire. We're told by Herodotus that when news was brought to Darius that Sardis had been sacked by the Athenians, the first question out of his mouth is, who were the Athenians? Once his people sort of explained the situation, though, we're told Darius got really, really angry and promised that he would punish them. So this expedition of 490 is really Darius wrapping up the final stages of this revolt by punishing his rebel subject, the Athenians, who had participated in this wider revolt.

Yeah. And so at best, even if the Athenians were like, yeah, sure, Darius, whatever you want, we won't fight you, the best they could hope for out of that was that Darius was going to come in and install a strong man ruler who would rule the city for Darius, be a good subservient king who would yield to Darius's power. And Athens at this point in time is a fledgling democracy. So this means that their whole system of government is going to get overthrown for a strongman ruler. And in this case, the ruler that Darius is going to put in place is this figure Hippias, who had already been a strongman autocrat in Athens and had gone into exile, was not well-liked, and the Athenians absolutely did not want this person back in any way, shape, or form in their city, let alone ruling it. So this is the best case outcome of this scenario if Athens yields to here. Now, Athens makes the bigger gamble in that they resist. Now, resistance, if they lose, means not only is Hippias getting installed, but a lot of Athenians are going to face death or enslavement as a result of that. And so the big gamble here is that they can resist and win, save their democracy, and prevent the death, enslavement of their people, and prevent the reinstallation of Hippias in an autocratic government.

And the final reason Marathon comes to exercise such a strong place in the Athenian imagination is the fact that they won this battle, this existential battle against overwhelming odds, more or less on their own. They did have help from an allied city-state, a tiny little place called Plataea to the north of Attica. That said, Plataea, because it was such a small place, could only send a few hundred soldiers in support of the Athenians. They had also asked for support from the Spartans. But as we've already discussed, the Spartans had to delay marching out because some religious ritual interfered with their ability to come to Athens before the full moon. And what that meant in practice is that when the Athenians won the battle at Marathon, they really did so on their own. And this was an important moment, right? The victory belonged not just to a small elite of the richest Athenian citizens. It really was a victory on the part of the democracy because this army that had set out from Athens included people from all walks of life, including those who could afford expensive armor, expensive weapons, but also those who just went out with whatever they could grab—a couple of javelins, their sling, maybe some sticks and rocks.

I feel like there's going to be a pitchfork or the equivalent to grab in there too.

Peasant equipment, basically.

Yeah. And so the result of all of this is that Marathon very quickly claims a lot of power over Athenian imagination and more broadly even over Greek imagination because a lot of the literature that survives from antiquity and that was around in antiquity is coming from Athenian sources. And so this legend grows exponentially as a result of that. But that's not to say that it wasn't legendary in its own time. So this is, if we can imagine an equivalent, it's roughly the equivalent of World War II and saying that you stormed the beaches at Normandy, right? That you fought at D-Day. It has that import and weight and significance behind it. And it's so important that actually they actually coin a term for people who fought at marathon, the Marathonomachoi. And this was a great point of pride if you could say, I am a Marathonomachos. I fought at marathon. And just as an example of this, the playwright Aeschylus, the Greek tragedian, one of the great playwrights of antiquity, when he dies, the only thing he wants in his epitaph on his tombstone is that he fought at Marathon.

Right. We'll ignore the fact that he had a 50-year-long career, which involved winning over and over various dramatic competitions at Athens.

Yes. The only thing he thinks is important in what he did, or the most important thing that he thinks he did in his life, was that he fought at Marathon. And not only that, he actually has a brother who dies in the fighting at Marathon.

I think he's a little bit jealous here.

His brother got to die at Marathon.

His brother got all the glory for being one of the people killed at Marathon.

And we get some other stories from Marathon that I think get exaggerated fairly quickly. There's a story that Herodotus tells that the Athenian army charged at a run for a full mile to engage in the battle. Probably didn't actually happen that way. That's probably an exaggeration. The fish was this big. And so it's easy to see how the story of this run, of Pheidippides' run to announce the victory, really fits into the larger myth-making and legend-telling that happens around the Battle of Marathon. And I think we can probably put that story of the run in this category of legends that develop around Marathon because Marathon is so significant in the Athenian mind.

So that leads to one final question. Namely what do those of us who are looking to find the original marathon do given that this story about Pheidippides' run is probably a later invention? And the answer is that even though this story is a later invention, it obscures a story that is equally exciting and probably features an even more heroic act, namely the fact that the Athenians had to march back after the battle at Marathon, a distance of 20 to 25 miles in order to get there before the Persians could attack the city in their absence. Although Herodotus stresses that the Athenians won a really decisive victory at Marathon, it's clear from what happened next that the Persian army was still intact enough that its commanders could consider sailing around that triangle we discussed earlier, rounding Cape Sounion and landing forces at Athens while the city was undefended. So the Athenians found themselves in the really horrible position of having to make a 20 to 25 mile march at the double back to Athens to try to get there before the Persian army did.

And they've got about 24 to 36 hours. That's about, we guess, how long it would take the Persian fleet to get around the tip of Attica. And you might say, okay, this isn't a big deal. People complete marathons in, you know, a few hours. So this shouldn't be that tough for the Athenian army to get back. But we have to keep in mind that the conditions for the Athenians were really not great and considerably worse than you might face in your average marathon today.

That's right. And, you know, for one thing, they had just fought a battle that was exhausting, both physically and psychologically. What Herodotus tells us is that the Persian and Athenian armies faced off against each other at Marathon for a few days because neither one was willing to really force an engagement. Eventually, the Athenians decided a battle was going to be necessary if they wanted to drive the Persians off. So they got up early one morning and advanced out into the Marathon plain. Now they had to advance probably a minimum of two miles, maybe as much as four or five before they were in contact with the Persian army. That's a lot of walking to do when you're fully kitted out for battle and when you're stressed out about what's to come, especially since at a certain point, the Athenians could see the Persian army forming up across from them. After advancing those two to four miles, they then found it necessary to charge for at least a few hundred yards. The reason for that is that the Persian army contained a whole lot of Persians trained as archers. So as the Athenian army started to draw closer to the Persian line, there was a point at which the arrows would start to fly in thick and fast. The natural impulse there is to start running to get under that cloud of arrows as quickly as possible. So by the time the Athenian line comes into contact with the Persians, everybody's already quite tired. Everybody's fantastically stressed out. And then you have to fight a battle, a battle which according to Herodotus went on for a while and which almost ended disastrously for the Athenians. At a certain point, the Persians actually broke through the center of the Athenian line and the Athenians avoided complete disaster only because their wings held it together well enough to reform and take on the Persians.

And break the Persian line.

And break the Persian line in turn. At that point, the Persians tried to fall back to their ships, and the Athenians chased them. And that involved another advance, probably of a couple of miles, followed by some intense fighting at the ships themselves. This is where our friend Aeschylus' brother gets killed.

Yes.

Once the Persians had re-embarked, the Athenians then had a long walk of several miles to get back to their camp. So all in all, at the end of this battle, they weren't in great shape.

Already lots of mileage and the physical and mental exhaustion of having gone through this really intense set of fighting. Now they've got to get back to Athens with maybe a night's not so good rest.

Not even, if they only have 24 to 36 hours to get back.

Yes. And the march back to Athens is going to be tough, a lot tougher because they're doing it under a time limit. So again, we're talking, you know, probably about 25 miles, give or take. And that's not a short distance. There's a lot of terrain, they've got to go go up and over this mountain range. And we're not talking about paved roads here, right? These are unpaved roads. Most of the Athenians, if not all of them are carrying their gear, right? You obviously can't leave that behind if what you think you're facing on the other end is another fight. Now that said, some of the wealthier Athenians would not have been lugging their own gear. They would have had enslaved attendants or possibly horses that would be carrying the gear for them. But nonetheless, those attendants have to do the walk with all this gear, even if the wealthy Athenians are not. And most of the Athenians are probably just carrying their own stuff. On top of that, it's going to be hot. We are talking about late August or early September. There's a reason why now, the Athens Marathon is done in November and not in late summer as this army would have done it. And of course, it's summer in Attica. There's not a lot of water. Water is going to be scarce along this route. This is not like a marathon today where you have, you know, hydration packs and energy gels and, you know, all of the assistance you could possibly want to get through it. And then, of course, on top of all this is the stress of we've just gone through this battle or two battles, depending on how you look at it. And we are now hustling back on this difficult route to then possibly have to set up and do this all again to save our city.

Now, in spite of all that physical and psychological hardship, the Athenians actually did make back in time. They pushed themselves to do it. They crossed over the mountains between Marathon and Athens itself. and they took up a position just south of the city of Athens where they could guard the main port of Athens at Phaleron. When the Persian fleet arrived, probably within only a couple of hours of the Athenians themselves, they could see that the Athenians had occupied a new position, and the Persian commanders decided not to test their luck by attempting to force the landing, and the city, hooray, was saved.

And in many ways, when you think about it, right, this march back by the army to save their city is a lot more dramatic, and a lot more meaningful than the legend that we get around this run of Pheidippides. And so this is one of the things that really stuck with us. When we did the marathon last year, we were not necessarily in the footsteps of Pheidippides, but we were in the footsteps of this army, marching for their lives, the lives of their family, their home. And now it took us over seven hours to finish this distance without gear, with unlimited snacks, water, support, etc., and how hard it was for us to get through it. And we could only imagine how much harder it was for those men 2,500 years ago to accomplish the same thing under much, much harder circumstances. Now, next time, we are going to talk a little bit more about what our experience doing this marathon was like, and a little bit more about how the marathon as an athletic event actually comes to exist beyond this legend of Pheidippides that people know. So that's all for today. I'm Emily.

I'm Cam.

This has been Have Toga, Will Travel. Subscribe to our show wherever you get your favorite podcasts, and follow us at havetogawilltravel.com or on all the socials.

Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you next time.