Marathon 490 BC: Miltiades' Thin Center and the Hoplite Sprint at Persia

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About a decade before Marathon, Athens and Eretria sent 25 ships to support the Ionian revolt and helped burn the lower city of Sardis. Herodotus says Darius I shot an arrow skyward vowing vengeance and had a servant remind him at dinner three times: remember the Athenians. In midsummer 490 BC a Persian fleet of about 600 triremes carrying around 25,000 infantry and cavalry destroyed Eretria and landed at the Bay of Marathon, guided by Hippias, the tyrant Athens had expelled. Some 10,000 Athenian hoplites and 1,000 Plataeans blocked the exits, while the runner Pheidippides ran 140 miles to Sparta, which refused to march until the Carneia festival ended with the full moon.

After a five-day standoff, the Persian cavalry apparently re-embarked to sail for undefended Athens. The general Miltiades matched the wider Persian line by thinning his center, led by Themistocles and Aristides, to four ranks while keeping the wings eight deep. The Greeks sprinted the last 200 meters through arrow fire, the wings crushed the Persian flanks, and they wheeled in to envelop the center. About 6,400 Persians died against 192 Athenians, including the war archon Callimachus. The army then marched roughly 25 miles back to Athens the same day, and the Persian fleet sailed home. The Spartans arrived the next day.

• Herodotus wrote that the Persians thought the charging Greeks were possessed by a fatal madness.
• Cynegirus, brother of the playwright Aeschylus, seized a Persian ship's stern and died when his hand was cut off.
• Athens vowed a goat to Artemis for each Persian killed and paid it off at 500 goats a year for some 90 years.
• Legends told of the god Pan spreading panic among the Persians and the ghost of Theseus leading the charge.
• Michel Bréal pitched the marathon race to Pierre de Coubertin for the 1896 Athens Olympics, based on a myth Herodotus never recorded.