The Campaign and the Battle of Marathon

Abstract

Many studies of the campaign and the battle of Marathon have suffered from conflicts between scholars in the field of hypothesis. The article by J. Kromayer illustrates this admirably. He concerned himself mainly with the rival hypotheses of Curtius and Delbrück, the former maintaining that the Persians embarked most of their force and all the cavalry just before the battle, and the latter that the Persians did not do so at all but delivered a full-scale but unsuccessful attack up the Vraná valley, which resulted in a counter-attack by the Greeks. Neither hypothesis rests upon the ancient evidence. Yet Curtius has been followed by Munro, Grundy and others, and recently by Gomme, Pritchett and Burn; and Delbrück has been followed by Meyer, De Sanctis and others. Other hypotheses are made about the duration of the engagement. They vary from Munro's matter of ‘minutes’ to Delbrück's three phases of hard-fought action, although they are both in conflict with the evidence of Herodotus. Again, hypotheses have been advanced in an attempt to dispense with the topographical evidence, for instance of the Mound at Marathon, e.g. the hypothesis that it existed before the battle. In a paper delivered in 1920 and published in this Journal in 1964, Whatley expressed his doubts about the value of such hypotheses; but he himself became involved in drawing analogies between the massive, complicated and many-fronted First World War and the one-day battle of Marathon—analogies which are quite misleading. In this paper I propose to be as economical as possible in making hypotheses and to keep to the ancient evidence first. This leads to a different order of exposition; for most scholars have begun with the campaign, formed their theory of the aims of the Persians and of the Greeks, and tried to make the battle conform with the theory, but I shall begin with the battle itself, for which we have much evidence, and treat the campaign afterwards.