Herodotus and Marathon

Abstract

Herodotus had has own priorities when he wrote his account of marathon. "Everyone knows that Herodotus' narrative of Narathon will not do," began A.W. Gomme, in an essay published more than thirty years ago, from which I have shamelessly borrowed my title. But it is our earliest and best account, and its point of view is more remarkable than most moderns have noticed. By the time Herodotus published his histories in the early years of the Archidamian War, Marathon had become the touch-stone of Athenian patriotism, and the fundament (or at least a good part of it) of her claim to be the saviour of Greece, as Herodotus himself acknowledged in the speech that he gave the Athenians at Plataea, where they claimed the honour of the left wing There, at darathon, they had stood alone against Persia and defeated forty-six nations! Yet, in Herodotus' account, what seems to have been most significant -- significant enough, at least, to deserve remark -- was that at Marathon, for the first, Greeks charged on the double and first dared to look without fear upon men in Persian dress (Hdt. 6.112.3). At Marathon, Persian expansionism reached its tide-mark.