The Persian Cavalry at Marathon

Abstract

THE attempt to understand the battle of Marathon is full of pitfalls. One that has received little attention has been the theoretical presupposition that cavalry always has an enormous advantage over infantry. The truth is that their relative strengths changed throughout antiquity. Cavalry had been less formidable before the Macedonian introduction of units of lancers that could charge home against almost any formation of infantry.' The battle of Adrianople, fought in A.D. 378, finally established the complete superiority of cavalry until the fourteenth century.2 Six hundred years after Adrianople, some notes on the battle of Marathon were set down in a lexicon by a Byzantine scholar. To a Byzantine, the story to be found in Herodotus, claiming that unsupported and outnumbered infantry had charged out into an open plain, engaged, and defeated its enemy, will have seemed possible only if the enemy cavalry were absent. Therefore, to find in this lexicon, which we now call The Suda, an attempt to remove the Persian cavalry from the scene is not surprising.