The Origin of the Marathon

In September of 490 BC, a Persian fleet of roughly 600 ships put in on the sandy plain of Marathon, about 40 km northeast of Athens. Aboard were more than 20,000 infantry and cavalry under the Persian commanders Datis and Artaphernes. Beside them stood Hippias, the tyrant Athens had driven out years before, who had chosen this same beach for the landing because he remembered it from his own rule. Persia had come to punish Athens for backing the Ionian rebels against Persian authority, and Hippias hoped a Persian win would put him back on the throne he had lost. Athens had no standing army. When word of the landing reached the city, the Athenians had to scramble together citizen-soldiers, men pulled from farms and workshops, with no professional force to call on. The threat was not abstract. A force that size, landed so close to an undefended city, could reach Athens itself within days if nothing stopped it. The Athenian generals knew they could not face 20,000 Persian troops alone. They needed Sparta, the one Greek city whose soldiers might tip the balance, and they needed word to reach Sparta fast. Everything that followed, the desperate run south, the battle on the plain, and the myth born centuries later, started on that beach the moment the ships grounded and Hippias stepped onto sand he already knew.