The Run That Named the Marathon

On Sunday, November 1, tens of thousands of people will run through all five boroughs of New York City. This year the five-borough course turns 50. Almost every one of them has heard some version of the story behind the distance: a Greek messenger runs from a battlefield to Athens, gasps out the news of victory, and dies.

It's a great story. It just isn't the one the oldest source tells.

What Herodotus actually says

In 490 BC (traditionally dated to August or September; the exact day is still debated) a Persian force under the commanders Datis and Artaphernes crossed the Aegean, sacked Eretria on Euboea, and landed on the plain of Marathon, about 25 miles northeast of Athens. Guiding them was Hippias, the exiled former tyrant of Athens, who expected to be put back in power. The Athenians needed help, and the obvious place to get it was Sparta.

So the generals sent a runner. Herodotus, writing a generation or two later (c. 430 BC), calls him Pheidippides (some manuscripts say Philippides) and says he was a professional day-runner, a man whose job was carrying messages on foot. He ran from Athens to Sparta, roughly 150 miles over hills, and Herodotus says he arrived the day after he left.

That is the real endurance feat in the story. Not 26 miles. Something closer to six marathons, back to back, with no aid stations.

Herodotus adds a detail most retellings drop. On the way, on Mount Parthenion above Tegea, Pheidippides said the god Pan called out to him by name and asked why the Athenians paid him no attention when he had been good to them. The Athenians took it seriously. After the war, sometime after 490 BC, they built a shrine to Pan below the Acropolis and held a yearly torch race in his honor.

The Spartans heard him out and agreed to help. But it was the ninth day of the month, and their custom would not let them march until the moon was full. They would come, just not yet. (Many modern historians connect this to the Carneia, a Spartan religious festival held around the full moon, but Herodotus himself doesn't name it.)

The battle, and the real run home

The Athenians did not wait, though their ten generals were split down the middle on whether to fight. Herodotus says Miltiades, a general who had served under the Persians and knew how they fought, went to the war-archon Callimachus, who held the tie-breaking vote, and convinced him that waiting would only give traitors time to open the city. Callimachus voted to fight.

With the Plataeans, who came in full force, the Athenians lined up against a much larger army. Herodotus doesn't give the size of either side; the figures you often see, around 9,000 to 10,000 Athenians and 1,000 Plataeans, come from later writers. He does say the Greek line was stretched to match the Persian front, with the center left thin and the wings strong. Then they crossed the gap to the Persian line at a run, the first Greeks he knew of to charge that way.

It worked. The Persian center broke through, but the Greek wings routed the troops facing them, then turned inward together on the center. By Herodotus's count about 6,400 Persians died and 192 Athenians, Callimachus among them. The Athenian dead were buried on the field, and the mound still stands at Marathon.

Then came the part that deserves more credit. The Persian fleet was sailing around the coast toward Athens, hoping to find the city empty. So the Athenian army marched back as fast as it could and was waiting when the ships arrived. The Persians looked, thought better of it, and sailed home.

The Spartans arrived after the full moon, 2,000 of them, having covered the distance in three days. They were too late for the fighting. They went to Marathon anyway to look at the Persian dead, praised the Athenians, and went home.

Where the dying messenger comes from

The famous version, the single runner who carries the news from Marathon and collapses, appears centuries later. Plutarch, writing c. 100 AD, mentions it and notes that sources disagree on the man's name: one says Thersippus, most say Eucles, who ran in full armor still hot from the fight and said only "Rejoice, we are victorious" before he died.

Lucian, writing in the second century AD, tells it again and gives the runner the name Philippides, folding Herodotus's courier into the later legend. In 1879 the English poet Robert Browning wrote a poem called "Pheidippides" that combined both runs into one heroic life. That's largely the version people know now.

From legend to 26.2

When the modern Olympics began in Athens in 1896, the French scholar Michel Bréal pushed for a long road race from Marathon to Athens in honor of the legend. A Greek water carrier named Spyridon Louis won it in 2:58:50 and became a national hero overnight.

The distance wobbled for years. The 1908 London Olympic course came out at 26 miles 385 yards, and that number was made the standard in 1921. So the official marathon is the length of a route laid out in England, named for a run in Greece that our best ancient source never mentions.

And Pheidippides got his real race too. In 1982, nearly 2,500 years after the battle, a group of British Royal Air Force officers set out to test whether Herodotus's account was possible on foot. It was. The race that grew from it, the Spartathlon, has run from Athens to Sparta since 1983.

Gutta Cavat Lapidem

If you're running Sunday, the legend makes a fine story for mile 20. The real one is better for the rest of the year.

The famous finish is the least verified part. What we know happened is less dramatic and more useful: a man who ran for a living and was ready on the day he was needed, an army that charged and then marched home tired because the job wasn't over, and allies who honored a rule they'd set for themselves even when it cost them.

None of it is about one heroic burst. It's about training long before the moment, then finishing the boring part after the glory. The Roman poet Ovid, writing from exile c. AD 13, put it in three words: dripping water hollows the stone. Gutta cavat lapidem.

Good luck to everyone on Staten Island at the start. If you're watching from the curb, bring a sign and a little patience. The Spartans would understand.