The Pheidippides Story Is Almost Certainly Wrong

Herodotus, writing roughly fifty years after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, tells the story of an Athenian named Pheidippides. He runs from Athens to Sparta to beg for reinforcements before the battle — about 240 kilometers — and runs back. On the way he meets the god Pan, who promises to help the Athenians if they restore his cult. That is the entire Pheidippides passage in Herodotus. There is no run from Marathon to Athens. There is no collapse. There is no "Joy, we win!" There is no death.

The death scene shows up much later. In the first century AD, Plutarch in On the Glory of Athens describes a herald running from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens to announce the victory and dying after delivering it — but he names the runner Thersippus, or possibly Eukles, citing earlier sources. Plutarch never calls him Pheidippides.

The fusion is the work of Lucian of Samosata, a Greek satirist writing in the second century AD. In A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting, Lucian sticks Pheidippides into Plutarch's plot, complete with the line that gets translated as "Joy, we win!" and the dramatic collapse. Lucian was funny, well-read, and not above stitching a better story together from older parts.

The modern marathon, when Michel Bréal proposed it for the first modern Olympics in 1896, was inspired by Robert Browning's 1879 poem Pheidippides, which leans on Lucian's version. The 26.2-mile race exists because a French linguist liked a Victorian poem based on a Roman-era satirist's embellishment of a Greek essayist. The Athens-to-Sparta run that Herodotus actually described — the Spartathlon — is now its own annual ultramarathon, 246 kilometers, and very few people have heard of it.