Battle of Marathon

“ Since 1872, when her independence was recognized, she has been shut up in the barren Morea and the rocky deserts north of the financial world as a turf-defaulter; and the massacre of Marathon is better known to our generation than the battle of Marathon. ”

“ For the battle, when now thought of, is no longer presented experience for anybody. Nor (and this is of special importance) is one man’s inner thought or experience, which in him represents the Battle of Marathon, in the faintest degree identical with the thought or experience which another man has in mind when he refers to the Battle of Marathon. ”

“ Marathon is only a vast plain, but what a plain! It has only a small mound in the centre to break its smoothness, but what courage, what patriotism, what nobility that mound covers! It was there, many authorities say, that all the Athenians were buried who fell at Marathon, although Byron claims that it covers the Persian dead.
How Greece has always loved freedom! In the École Polytechnique are three Turkish battle-flags and some shells and cannon-balls from a war so recent that the flags have scarcely had time to dry or the shells to cool. ”

“ An idealist may undertake to say, as much as he pleases, that what, in its time, was called the Battle of Marathon was a mere mass of contents of experience in the minds of the Greeks and Persians concerned. He may try to deny that the swords, javelins, and horses present were in any sense transcendently real objects, external to anybody’s experience. ”

“ They were merely confirmatory of the already existing bias which Marathon had created. The day of Marathon is the critical epoch in the history of the two nations. It broke forever the spell of Persian invincibility, which had previously paralyzed men's minds. It generated among the Greeks the spirit which beat back Xerxes, and afterward led on Xenophon, Agesilaus, and Alexander, in terrible retaliation through their Asiatic campaigns. ”

“ It secured for mankind the intellectual treasures of Athens, the growth of free institutions, the liberal enlightenment of the Western world, and the gradual ascendency for many ages of the great principles of European civilization.
EXPLANATORY REMARKS ON SOME OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE BATTLE OF MARATHON Nothing is said by Herodotus of the Persian cavalry taking any part in the battle, although he mentions that Hippias recommended the Persians to land at Marathon, because the plain was favorable for cavalry evolutions. ”

“ Some detachments of the best-armed troops would be required to garrison the city itself and man the various fortified posts in the territory, so that it is impossible to reckon the fully equipped force that marched from Athens to Marathon, when the news of the Persian landing arrived, at higher than ten thousand men. ”

“ Miltiades caused each wing to wheel inwards, and fell upon6 both flanks of the Persian advance, absolutely overwhelming it, and throwing it back upon the main line in such confusion as to lead to complete victory.
Before Battle of Marathon
You must note that demoralization always plays an immense part in battle. The Old Dessauer capped all battle-tactics with his: “Wenn Du gehst nicht zurück, so geht der Feind zurück!” (If you don’t fall back, why, the enemy will fall back.) Whenever a tactical manœuvre unnerves the enemy, it at once transforms his army into a mob. ”

“ A public orator lately spoke with contempt of the Battle of Marathon, because only 192 perished on the side of the Athenians, whereas by improved mechanism and destructive chemicals, some 50,000 men or more may now be destroyed within a few hours. ”

“ Against these successes the loss of six thousand four hundred men at the battle of Marathon, a less number than Darius deliberately sacrificed in a stratagem at the siege of Babylon, would have seemed but a petty counterbalance in the despatches of his generals, set off, as it was, by the spoils and the captives of Euboea. ”

“ Thus many think of the same battle, but the contents of experience in many minds are not the same, and need not even be very similar. In vain,” so our realist may add, “does an idealist attempt, in such cases, to take refuge afresh in scepticism, and merely to doubt whether we all are really referring to the same Battle of Marathon at all. ”

“ Bagehot said, and said wisely after his wont, that if you catch an intelligent, uneducated man of thirty, and tell him about the battle of Marathon, he will calculate the chances, and estimate the results ”

“ But what the idealist cannot explain, or even express in his terms, is how various schoolboys to-day, various poets and orators in successive ages, various historians, scholars, archaeologists, can all think, read, learn, dispute, about the same event, namely, the Battle of Marathon itself. ”

“ Marathon was the other instance. It is a battle of problems, a problem among battles, whose data are woefully imperfect. The only thing about it which seems clear is that, for some reason which can only be conjectured, it formed but an imperfect test of the fighting capacity and methods of Greek and Persian respectively.
Thus, for all practical purposes, when the two races came into conflict in 480 they were, militarily speaking, unknown quantities to one another, and each had to learn how best to meet the strategy and tactics of the enemy. ”

“ There was evidently much danger that the Persians would force a passage through the village of Marathon, farther toward the north-west. Had they done this, they might have rounded Pentelicus, and descended [pg 199] the main plain of Attica, from the valley below Dekelea. Perhaps, however, this pass was then guarded by an outlying fort, or by some defences at Marathon itself. The site of the battle is absolutely fixed by the great mound, upon which was placed a lion, which has been carried off, no one knows when or whither. ”

“ No! there is reason enough why battle-fields should be, as they are, places of pilgrimage. The remoteness of the struggle hardly diminishes the interest with which we visit the scene; Marathon is as sacred as if the Greeks conquered there last year. ”

“ The Battle of Marathon: A Poem. [Quotations from Akenside and Byron.] By E. B. Barrett. London: Printed for W. Lindsell, 87 Wimpole Street, Cavendish Square. 1820.
1826. An Essay on Mind, with other Poems. [Quotation from Tasso.] London: James Duncan, Paternoster Row. ”

“ Still, among them there were many gallant men, under a veteran general; they were familiarized with victory, and in contemptuous confidence their infantry, which alone had time to form, awaited the Athenian charge. On came the Greeks, with one unwavering line of leveled spears, against which the light targets, the short lances and cimeters of the Orientals offered weak defence. The front rank of the Asiatics must have gone down to a man at the first shock. ”

“ The enterprise and genius of an Englishman have lately confirmed by fresh evidence, and invested with fresh interest, the might of the Persian monarch who sent his troops to combat at Marathon. Inscriptions in a character termed the Arrow-headed, or Cuneiform, had long been known to exist on the marble monuments at Persepolis, near the site of the ancient Susa, and on the faces of rocks in other places formerly ruled over by the early Persian kings. ”

“ The War-ruler, Callimachus, had the leading of the right wing; the Platæans formed the extreme left; and Themistocles and Aristides commanded the centre. The line consisted of the heavy-armed spearmen only; for the Greeks—until the time of Iphicrates—took little or no account of light-armed soldiers in a pitched battle, using them only in skirmishes, or for the pursuit of a defeated enemy. The panoply of the regular infantry consisted of a long spear, of a shield, helmet, breastplate, greaves, and short sword. ”

“ As the broken remnants of the fleet returned to Asia, leaving Mardonius with no sea communications, and harassed by increasing opposition, he was compelled to retreat also. In 490 Darius sent out another army under Mardonius, this time embarking it on a fleet of 600 triremes which succeeded in arriving safely at the coast of Attica in the bay of Marathon. While the army was Page 28 disembarking it was attacked by Miltiades and utterly defeated. The second expedition, therefore, came to nothing. But Marathon can hardly be called a decisive battle because it merely postponed the invasion ”

“ Mountaineers from Hyrcania and Afghanistan, wild horsemen from the steppes of Khorassan, the black archers of Ethiopia, swordsmen from the banks of the Indus, the Oxus, the Euphrates and the Nile, made ready against the enemies of the Great King. ”

“ Some grudging critics, including the erudite Mahaffy, incline to believe that Marathon was a rather small affair, judged by purely military standards—a conflict of one undisciplined host with an even less disciplined one, in an age when battles ordinarily were won by an endurance of nerve in the face of a hand-to-hand charge rather than by actual carnage. These maintain that the chief celebrity of Marathon rests not on its military glories, but on the fame which the Athenians, a literary race, gave it in song and story. ”

“ He lost his balance, and, being so exhausted that he could not stand longer, pitched headlong to the ground, just as the fleet Hugh jumped into the lead, raced twenty steps further, broke the extended tape, and thus won the race.
How the heavens seemed to fairly quiver with the roars that broke out! It had been a most thrilling finish for the greatest race ever run in all the country. Time might come and time might go, but never would those who had been so fortunate as to witness the conclusion of the Marathon forget the thrilling spectacle. ”

“ It had been arranged, as is always done, that when a runner was sighted nearing the bend a gun would be fired by the sentry on duty there, to attract the attention of the crowd, so that they might have the first glimpse of the leading contestants, as they rounded that abrupt curve where the view was shut off.
There was now nothing going on in the arena, the entire programme having been carried out. Still, few, if any, left their seats, although they had been there for several hours, it might be. The deepest interest centered upon the completion of the Marathon race. ”

“ They soon began to run and leave their wounded behind, and in place of a retreat their disorderly flight must have had the appearance of a Marathon race, the rattle of musketry acting or serving as signals for each to do his best on the home stretch. ”

“ The chances of sickness or accident or change of climate were too many to justify them in depending upon a single competitor to carry the colors of his country in any given struggle. Thus in the pole vaulting, hammer throwing, swimming, hurdling, javelin casting, there would be from three to six competitors each. In the Marathon—most important of all—as many as a dozen would probably be taken. So that all were buoyed up by the hope that even if some luckier or better man carried off first honors to-day, they still might be of the elect, if they were well up at the finish. ”

“ The only question with the boys here is not whether you will win—they’re dead sure of that—but whether you’ll hang up a new record.”
“There really isn’t any such thing as a record for the Marathon,” said Bert. “The conditions are so different in each race that no one can fairly be compared with another. If it were simply a matter of padding around on a flat track, you could get at the time easily. ”

“ The same is true in every field. The news of the victory of Marathon was borne by a runner, who coursed the twenty-four miles, gasped out his word of triumph, and dropped dead. Since then man has harnessed the ox, mounted the horse, and surpassed all other creatures in means of travel upon and within the waters, across the earth, high and higher in the air. ”

“ A still greater pitfall before us is that we read history not as men, but as gods, knowing the event. The name of Marathon to us implies not struggle, not danger, but triumph; and as we think of the little band of Athenians defiling from the mountains and looking on the sea, with the utmost determination we cannot quite enter into their thoughts. ”

“ Victory is on Marathon.
She cometh with brightened cheek,
She who all day hath wept;
The wife and mother’s tears,
Where her youngest infant slept,
The heart is in her eyes alone,
What careth she for Marathon? ”

“ Then there are a lot of other fellows in the run who may give him a pain. But, according to the programme, our race comes next after this pole vaulting contest; so, boys, we'd better be moving around, and getting our place in line, according to our several numbers."
CHAPTER XVIII THE GREAT MARATHON RACE It was plainly noticeable how that vast crowd began to stir, and show signs of increased interest when the numerous trim runners entered for the big Marathon started to gather for the preliminary stage of the race. ”

“ There had been more or less talk concerning the advisability of allowing school boys to undertake such a long Marathon race. Fifteen miles, many thought, was far too strenuous an undertaking for lads as yet in their teens. Full-fledged athletes only run twenty miles in all the famous long distance races, and even at that numbers of them do not finish, the task being too much for them. ”

“ A handful of free citizens had defeated a horde of slaves, and this result was due in no small degree to their athletic training. Witness the famous charge of Marathon. Critics may throw doubt on its truth: it is sufficient that Herodotus supposed it possible. An army charging a distance of eight furlongs over ground that would try any cross-country runner! No wonder the Persians regarded the Greeks as madmen. The mere existence of such a story is proof enough of the athletic training of the nation. ”