“History worth reading. Stories worth remembering.”
On Sunday 8 November, thousands of runners will set off from Marathon for the 43rd Athens Authentic Marathon and finish at the Panathenaic Stadium, in the centre of Athens. Most of them know the story of the hoplite messenger who reached Athens after the battle against the Persians, shouted “Nenikēkamen!” (“We have won!”) and dropped dead. Over two and a half thousand years, though, the story has changed shape many times. It probably has nothing to do with what really happened, and it begins well before the battle, with twenty Athenian ships.
Ionia in Flames
In 499 BC the Greek cities of Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor, rose up against the Persian Empire, which stretched from present-day Pakistan in the east to Thrace and Egypt in the west. Aristagoras, the tyrant of Miletus, crossed to mainland Greece to look for help. His first stop was Sparta, the city-state whose hoplites were feared as unbeatable.
According to Herodotus, Aristagoras brought a bronze tablet engraved with a map of the whole known world, showing its seas, its rivers and its peoples. He began with the Ionians’ next-door neighbours, the Lydians, and their gold, then worked his way east, people by people, to the Cilicians on the coast facing Cyprus, who paid the Persians a yearly tribute of 500 talents of silver. Last came the famous city of Susa, the Great King’s seat and the home of his treasury. “Why fight Messenians and Argives over a little poor land,” he asked, “when you could take Asia?”
Cleomenes asked for three days to decide. Apart from being good soldiers, the Spartans were known for two things: they never rushed a decision, and they kept their words few. Hence the word laconic, from Laconia, the Spartans’ home region. So when the three days were up, Cleomenes asked only one question: how many days’ journey was it from the sea to the Great King’s seat? When Aristagoras answered “three months”, Cleomenes told him to leave Sparta before sunset. By Greek standards it was an enormous distance. The Spartans were not yet ready to shake off their provincial outlook and think big.. And, truth be told, they never would be.
Aristagoras then tried to bribe Cleomenes, but the king’s eight-year-old daughter, Gorgo, stepped in. Even in the cradle, Spartan women were not to be trifled with.
Next stop: Athens, which had just begun trying out a peculiar new system of government called democracy. Aristagoras won the Athenians over by reminding them that Miletus was an Athenian colony. Herodotus notes the irony: Aristagoras persuaded the Athenians but not Cleomenes, which suggests, he says, that it is easier to fool many people than one. The Assembly (the Ekklesia, where every adult male citizen could speak and vote) decided to send twenty ships. Eretria, a city on the island of Euboea, agreed to send five triremes as well. It did so not as a favour to Athens but to repay an old debt: in Eretria’s war with Chalcis, the so-called Lelantine War, the Milesians had stood by its side. The ships sent to Ionia, Herodotus writes, became “the beginning of evils for Greeks and barbarians”. Only Alexander the Great would bring that story to an end, 168 years later.
Keep reading to find out:
Revenge on the menu: Sardis in flames, a Great King who needed reminding of Athens at every dinner, and the road to Marathon.
The myth: one runner, more than 500 kilometres, a battle in between and a single word at the finish.
The classic November race: a Balkan champion and peace activist, a barefoot Ethiopian, and 2,195 extra metres of torture courtesy of Windsor Castle.
1896: a philologist’s letter, a stadium rebuilt in marble, a water carrier from Maroussi, and a runner disqualified for taking a carriage.
Across the Atlantic: a famished runner from Cyprus who shouted “For Greece!”, the oldest annual marathon in the world, and two words that held a city together.
The sources: Herodotus, Plutarch, Lucian and a Victorian poet, and how three different men became one Pheidippides.
The other race: a Wing Commander, 246 kilometres to Sparta, and the difference between the runner of legend and the runner of history.
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