Battle of Marathon

The Battle of Marathon was fought in 490 BCE, when an Athenian-led force defeated a Persian expeditionary army on the coast of Attica. The victory did not end the Persian threat, but it showed that the Persian army could be beaten by Greek hoplites, and it became a founding source of Athenian pride. The span of this entry, running to 404 BCE, takes in the rise and fall of the Athenian power that Marathon helped inspire.

The background lay in the Ionian Revolt of 499 to 494 BCE, when Greek cities in Asia Minor rebelled against Persian rule. Athens and Eretria sent limited help, and their forces took part in the burning of Sardis. King Darius I never forgot this. After crushing the revolt, he sent a naval force across the Aegean to punish both cities and extend Persian influence in Greece. The Persians took Eretria and then landed at Marathon, about 40 kilometers from Athens.

The Athenians marched out to meet them, joined by a small contingent from Plataea. Sparta promised help but arrived too late, delayed according to Herodotus by a religious festival. The sources for the battle are thin, mainly Herodotus writing decades later, and the numbers are uncertain. Modern historians generally think the Persians outnumbered the Greeks, but not by the huge margins of later tradition. Athenian command was shared among ten generals, with Miltiades the leading figure in urging attack. The Greeks apparently strengthened their wings and advanced at speed, and the Persian center held while the flanks closed in. The Persians broke and fled to their ships. Herodotus reports about 6,400 Persian dead against 192 Athenians, figures that are probably approximate at best. The Athenian war leader Callimachus was among the dead.

The Persians then sailed toward Athens, but found it defended and withdrew. The famous run from Marathon to Athens with news of victory comes from later sources and is doubtful. Herodotus instead records a run by Pheidippides to Sparta before the battle, which is the more reliable tradition. The Athenian dead were buried on the battlefield under a mound that still stands.

Marathon was a check rather than a conclusion. Darius's successor Xerxes invaded in 480 BCE, and the Greeks fought on at Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea. In the following decades Athens built a naval empire, enjoyed its cultural golden age, and came to see Marathon as proof of its special destiny. That ambition eventually brought it into conflict with Sparta. The Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BCE with Athens' surrender, closing the era of Athenian dominance that Marathon had helped open.