The Battle of Marathon (490 BCE)

The Battle of Marathon was fought in late summer 490 BCE on the coastal plain of Marathon, about 40 kilometres northeast of Athens, between a Persian seaborne force under Datis and Artaphernes and the citizen army of Athens with its ally Plataea. The Athenians won and the Persians sailed home. For Greeks it became the founding legend of Athenian greatness; for the Persian Empire it was a setback at the end of a campaign that had otherwise met most of its goals.

A punitive expedition across the Aegean

After the expedition of Mardonius in 492 BCE had secured Thrace and Macedon by land, Darius I tried a different approach. In 490 he sent a fleet straight across the Aegean. Herodotus gives it 600 triremes, together with transport ships built to carry horses. Its commanders were Datis, a Mede, and Artaphernes, son of the satrap of Sardis who had fought the Ionian Revolt and nephew of the king.

Datis is one of the few figures of these wars who appears in a Persian document. A tablet from the Persepolis Fortification archive, dated to early 494 BCE, records wine rations for a Datiya who had travelled from Sardis to the king carrying a sealed document. The historian David Lewis argued that this is the same man, which would make him a senior officer already trusted with the western front.

Naxos, Delos and Eretria

The fleet sailed from Cilicia to Samos and then struck west through the islands. Naxos, which had defied a Persian siege in 499, was taken and its town and temples burned. At Delos, sacred to Apollo and Artemis, Datis did the opposite: Herodotus says he forbade his men to land on the island and offered 300 talents’ weight of frankincense on the altar. The contrast fits Persian practice elsewhere. Rebels were punished, but sanctuaries that did not resist were respected.

The fleet then crossed to Euboea. Carystus was forced to submit. Eretria, one of the two cities that had helped burn Sardis, held out for six days until two of its citizens betrayed it. Its temples were burned in revenge for the temples of Sardis and its people were deported. Herodotus says Darius later settled them at Ardericca in Cissia, a district near Susa, where they still spoke Greek in his own day. This was a standard Persian measure: whole communities of rebels were moved to the heartland, where they worked the king’s land.

Landing at Marathon

The Persians were guided by Hippias, the former tyrant of Athens, who had been expelled in 510 BCE and hoped to return as a Persian client. He chose Marathon because the plain suited cavalry and lay near the old power base of his family. The Athenians marched out to meet them and camped at the edge of the plain. A runner, Philippides (or Pheidippides), was sent to Sparta and, Herodotus says, arrived the day after he left Athens, a distance of about 240 kilometres. The Spartans agreed to help but said religious law prevented them from marching before the full moon. Only Plataea, a small Boeotian town allied to Athens, sent its full force.

The two armies faced each other for several days. The ten Athenian generals were divided about whether to attack, and Herodotus says Miltiades persuaded the polemarch Callimachus to cast his vote for battle. Miltiades knew the Persians well: he had ruled the Chersonese in Thrace as a Persian vassal and had fled when the Ionian Revolt failed.

The battle

Herodotus describes a simple plan. The Athenians thinned their centre to match the length of the Persian line and made their wings strong. They then advanced at a run over the last stretch, about eight stades (some 1.5 kilometres), which Herodotus says no Greeks had done before; modern scholars doubt that men in armour ran so far and think the running covered only the final few hundred metres. In the centre the Persians and the Saka, the best troops in the Persian line, broke through. On both wings the Athenians and Plataeans won, then turned inward and attacked the victorious Persian centre.

The Persians fled to their ships. Fighting at the water’s edge, the Athenians captured seven ships; Callimachus was killed, and so was Cynegirus, brother of the playwright Aeschylus. Herodotus counts 6,400 dead on the Persian side and 192 Athenians. The Athenian figure is reliable, since the names were inscribed on monuments at the mound. The Persian figure may be an estimate or a later round number.

The puzzle of the Persian cavalry

Herodotus says Marathon was chosen for its cavalry, yet horsemen play no part in his account of the fighting. Historians have proposed that the cavalry had been re-embarked, perhaps to sail for Athens, which would explain why the Athenians chose that moment to attack. A short entry in the Byzantine Suda lexicon, which explains a proverb as “the cavalry are away”, is often cited in support, but it was written about 1,400 years later and its value is debated.

After the battle

The Persian fleet sailed round Cape Sunium towards Phalerum, the harbour of Athens. Herodotus reports a shield flashed as a signal from the hills, a story used against the Alcmaeonid family. The Athenian army marched back in time to guard the city, and the Persians, finding it defended, sailed for Asia. The Spartans, 2,000 strong, arrived after the battle and could only view the dead. The famous run from Marathon to Athens with the news of victory does not appear in Herodotus; it is first found in writers of the Roman period, such as Plutarch and Lucian, and inspired the modern marathon race in 1896.

How the Persians would have seen it

No Persian source mentions Marathon. That silence is normal: royal inscriptions record the king’s order and victories, not the fortunes of a regional force. Seen from Susa, the campaign of 490 had punished Naxos and Eretria, brought the Cyclades and Carystus under Persian control, and lost a battle in Attica. It was not a full invasion led by the king; the main royal army never left Asia. Herodotus himself says Darius took the news as a reason to prepare a larger war, which was delayed by the Egyptian revolt and his death in 486 BCE.

For Athens, Marathon became a source of pride for generations. Aeschylus’s epitaph mentions Marathon rather than his plays, and the battle was painted in the Stoa Poikile in the Athenian Agora. This later prestige shaped the way the war was told, including Herodotus’s account, written some sixty years after the event. Compare the Persian and Greek views in the overview of the Greco-Persian Wars and see Herodotus and the Persians on how far his account can be trusted. The larger invasion that followed is told in Xerxes’ invasion of Greece.