The Charge That Made Athens an Empire

In late August or early September of 490 BCE, roughly 10,000 Athenian hoplites and 1,000 Plataean allies stood across the plain of Marathon from a Persian expeditionary force perhaps two or three times their size. The Persians had landed there expecting to march on Athens. Sparta, which had promised reinforcements, was delayed by a religious festival. The Athenian generals, led by Miltiades, decided to attack alone.

What happened at Marathon was unusual on two counts. First, the Athenian line was thinned in the center and reinforced on the wings. When the lines met, the Persians broke through the middle, but the Athenian wings rolled inward and crushed the Persian flanks. Second, the hoplites covered the final stretch of the advance at a run — Herodotus says the last eight stadia, around 1,500 meters, though modern historians find a 200-meter sprint into bowshot range more plausible. Either way, charging in 30 kilograms of bronze and wood was not standard practice.

The casualty figures are lopsided to the point of disbelief: Herodotus gives 6,400 Persian dead against 192 Athenian, numbers we should treat with suspicion the way we treat any battle count from the winners. But the Athenian losses were carefully named on a memorial and buried under a mound that still stands on the plain.

The celebrated story of Pheidippides running from Marathon to Athens with the news, then dropping dead, is a later confection. Herodotus, writing within living memory, mentions Pheidippides only as a runner sent before the battle to ask Sparta for help — a 240-kilometer round trip he completed in two days. The dying-marathon-runner version surfaces in Plutarch and Lucian, four to six centuries on.

The political consequence outlasted the casualties. A polis of farmers had beaten the largest empire on earth without the Spartans, and they knew it.