A History of the Marathon Race — 490 B.C. to 1975* – by John Apostal Lucas – *Originally printed in: The Amateur Athlete, 28 (November 1957), 10-13. – Part I.

“Forty kilometers and then some — a marathon history from Pheidippides to Bill Rodgers”
Greek Antecedents    

The marathon race is one of the greatest tests of individual endurance, and, in the western world, has resulted in an extraordinary history of physical prowess, courage, foolhardiness, drama and tragedy. The interesting word “marathon” may be used as a noun to describe any long distance foot race; in a twentieth-century context, it refers to an endurance contest of twenty-six miles, 385 yards.

It is also a geographic location in Greece—made famous in 490 B.C. as the “Battle of Marathon.” The word “marathon” may be used as an adjective in describing any phenomenon of great length, and it is commonly used in this manner. This paper will deal with the history of the marathon run—from its shrouded ancient origins to the extraordinary 1975 Boston Marathon victory of that New England free spirit—William “Bill” Rodgers. The even more perplexing problem of why men and women will spend years of preparation in order to run rapidly and without stopping more than forty-two kilo-meters will at least be alluded to in this document.

Highly-organized competitive sport was invented by the Greeks. Homer’s epic poem, the Iliad, is a tapestry of sport training and competition. Book XXIII, “The funeral rites of Patroclus, and how the games were held in his honor,” is one of literature’s most revealing insights into man’s play and competitive instincts.1 Later in 776 B.C., the Olympic Games were established to honor the gods, to pay homage to Greek warriors, and to emphasize and formalize a way of living that was to characterize these people for a thousand years. Herod-otus immortalized this Greek penchant for sport in Book VIII of his Histories, where Greek deserters, brought before the Persians king, were asked what their countrymen were doing at that time.

The Arcadians told him that they were keeping the Olympic festival and watching athletic contests and horse-races. The questioner asked what was the prize that they were contending for; and the Arcadians told him about the crown of olive that was to be won. Then Tigranes, son of Artabanus, said a most noble thing, though the king thought him a coward for it: for when he heard that the prize was a garland and not money, he could not hold his peace, but exclaimed in the hearing of all: “alas, Mardonius, what men are these that you have brought us to fight, who hold contests not for money but for the honor of winning.”2

The Ancient Legend of Marathon

Nowhere in Greek sporting literature is there any mention of a twenty-six-mile marathon race. The Olympic multiple stade race probably did not exceed three miles. According to history and legend, the Persian king, Darius, attacked Greece to punish Athens for sending aid to the Ionian rebels. Herodotus says that Darius was so angered by the sack of Sardis that, during the rest of his life, he had a herald cry out to him thrice each day at dinner,—“O King, remember the Athenians!” The truth is that Persia was in a full career of conquest, and invasion was inevitable. The first expedition against Greece, 492 B.C., failed; in 490 B.C. the full strength of the Persian army and navy captured the Greek city of Eretria. Then the Persians landed on the plain of Marathon in Attica, prepared to punish Athens.

In uncharacteristic fashion, Miltiades and the Assembly decided to leave the city, march out, and attack the Persians at once. Before they left the city, says Herodotus [ca. 484?-425 B.C.], the Athenian generals sent off a message of help to Sparta. “The messenger was an Athenian named Pheidippides, a trained runner still in the practice of his profession.”3 He reached Sparta the day after leaving Athens. “Men of Sparta,” he is reported to have said, “the Athenians ask of you to help them, and not to stand by while the most ancient city of Greece is crushed and enslaved by a foreign invader.”4

Apparently, Pheidippides (sometimes called Philippides) raced these 150 miles in vain—a rugged route between Athens and Sparta passing through the mountainous country of Arcadia. The Spartans, celebrating their festival of the Carneia, were unable to send their promised help before the full moon, which was probably six days away. Herodotus goes on to relate that during Pheidippides’ return to Athens, he was stopped by the god Pan on Mount Parthenium, who promised to help the Athenians. The Greeks apparently believed the courier’s message and, again, according to Herodotus, sought the gods’ favor with yearly sacrifices and torch races. “After the full moon,” says the great Greek story-teller, “two thousand Lacedaemonians came to Athens making so great haste to reach it that they were in Attica on the third day from their leaving Sparta. Albeit they came too late for the battle.”5

The orator-pamphleteer, Isocrates [436-338 B.C.], in delivering his Panegyric before a crowd assembled for the Olympic games in 380 B.C. agreed with Herodotus on the speed of the Spartans, noting that “the Lacedaemonians in three days and as many nights covered 1200 stadia in marching order.”6

The task of disentangling marathon fact from legend and myth, of seeing through the romance of marathon literature, and of discarding fiction about Greek long-distance running feats is a formidable one. There seems little doubt that a courier was sent from Athens to Sparta … and that he returned with the discouraging message of delay by Spartan warriors. At this juncture—the fate of Pheidippides during and after the Battle of Marathon—is puzzling. Hammond’s definitive study of the September struggle in 490 B.C. tells us little about the Athenian courier.7 Only the singular account of the Greek satirist, Lucian [ca. 120?-200?], some six hundred years after the fact, would indicate that Pheidippides was present at the Battle of Marathon and raced to Athens with the victory message. Lucian was reminded of the marathon story, when inadvertently greeting some friends, he said, “Health to you,” instead of the more correct and ancient phrase, “Joy to you.” He goes on to trace the origin of the latter phrase to:

Philippides, the one who acted as courier, is said to have used it first in our sense when he brought the news of victory from Marathon and addressed the magistrates in session when they were anxious how the battle had ended; “Joy to you, we’ve won,” he said, and there and then he died, breathing his last breath with that “Joy to you.”8

This is the only mention by an ancient writer declaring that it was Pheidippides who raced from Marathon to Athens. If one accepts this story, it must also be accepted that the mes-senger Pheidippides, or Philippides, raced the three-hundred-mile round trip between Athens and Sparta, marched to Mara-thon, and after the struggle, ran himself to death on his return to Athens. It seems unlikely.

Aristophanes [c. 448-388? B.C.], wrote the Clouds in 423 B.C., only sixty-seven years after the famous battle. The Athenian dramatist dwells at length on a certain Strepsiades and his vulgar and dissolute son, Pheidippides. It is unlikely that Aristophanes would have taken the name of the heroic Marathon courier for such unsavory a character as his Pheidip-pides of the Clouds. Lucian had attributed both runs to Pheidippides, but received no encouragement or confirmation in this position. Pliny the Elder [c. 23-79 A.D.], in his Naturalis Historia, calls Pheidippides’s run from Athens to Sparta “a mighty feat.”9 Plutarch [c. 46?-120?] is more specific. The Greek biographer, in a famous discussion of Athenian military prowess as contrasted with Athenian wisdom (called “DeGloria Atheniensium), elaborated:

Again, the news of the battle of marathon Thersippus of Eroeadae brought back, as Heracleides Ponticus related; but most historians declare that it was Eucles who ran in full armor, hot from the battle, and, burst-ing in at the doors of the first men of the State, could only say, “Hail! We are victorious” and straightaway expired.10

Pheidippides—Dubious Double Marathon Runner

There seems sufficient evidence to state that the Greek pro-fessional, Pheidippides, made the round trip from Athens to Sparta, but not the more famous, and shorter trial from Marathon to Greece. Harris relies heavily on Plutarch in stating that the Athenian Eucles, upon returning to Athens from abroad after the army had marched out to Marathon, “ran out to take his place in the ranks, arrived just in time to fight in the battle, and then ran back to announce the victory in Athens, dying as he did so.”11  A “modern confusion,” says Gardiner, has resulted in the wrong man receiving credit for the victory run from the plain of Marathon to Athens.12

Ehrenberg goes further by labeling as “romantic invention” the idea that the same warrior-athlete made both runs.13 Herodotus makes no mention of a messenger from Marathon to Athens—a courier who shouted “nike!” (victory!) with his last breath as he fell dead in the agora. The modern historian, Swain, con-jectured that “Miltiades had every reason to let the city learn of his victory at the earliest possible moment … yet we find no reference to [a] runner until more than six hundred years later.”14  The whole marathon race is commemorative of a legend of doubtful authenticity.

Provost C. Henry Daniel of Worcester College, Oxford, concluded that “there is no mention of the presence of Pheidippides at Marathon, nor of any special mes-senger carrying the news of the victory to Athens.”15 Another scholar, writing in 1908, is of the opinion that Plutarch’s six-hundred-year-old version is correct—that a certain Thersippus brought the news of the battle, expiring after he announced the victory. Lucian, also writing long after the fact, credited Pheidippides with both memorable runs. “A casual error of memory,” on Lucian’s part, said this same early-20th century writer in a letter to The Times of London.16

Noted historian, W. C. Lawson, writing during the Ameri-can marathon “craze” of 1909, declared the alleged death run of Pheidippides as both untrue and absurd. “Even as a teleological myth,” he says, “this is hardly a success … it gives no encouragement to defenders of the heart-breaking long run.”17 Three scholars answered Lawson’s accusation, but were more concerned with the accuracy of Greek translations, proper sources, and spelling, rather than the central matter of a Mara-thon to Athens run.18 Herodotus never heard of Pheidippides, says Professor Lawson, in a reply to his three colleagues. “If, sixty years after the battle, any such tale had been current, surely the chronicler would have heard it from his Athenian friends and used it to gild his rather meager record….”19 Poetic license and nineteenth-century romanticism are the cul-prits in crediting Pheidippides with the fabulous Marathon to Athens run.20

The Marathon as Nineteenth-Century Romantic Imagery

The European Romantic Movement began in the late eighteenth century, continuing well into the next period. The heroic strug-gle for independence by the Greeks, culminating in full libe-ration from Turkey in 1832, created a significant stir of romantic sympathy for the Greeks, and, especially, a renaissance of ancient Greek scholarship. Lord Byron [1788-1824] had par-ticipated in these early struggles and wrote in impassioned tones about the glory that was Greece. Standing amidst the Mara-thon battleground, he cried:

The mountains look on Marathon—
and Marathon looks on the sea;
and musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free,
For standing on the Persian’s grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.21

In 1823, Byron set out to join Greek insurgents and died of fever at Missolonghi in April, 1824. Several years earlier he had finished his series of cantos, Childe Harold. In his youth Byron had toured Greece, and he remembered the country as a place of romance and unending beauty. Later, longing for Greek freedom, he exclaimed, “Ah! Greece! they love thee least who owe thee most—.” In his Second Canto, Byron is shaken by “gray marathon”:

The sun, the soil, but not the slave, the same;
Unchanged in all except its foreign lord—
Preserved alike its bounds and boundless fame
The Battlefield, where Persia’s victim horde
First bowed beneath the brunt of Hellas’ sword,
As on the morn to distant Glory dear
When Marathon became a magic word.22

Robert Browning [1812-1889], English poet, had little formal education, apart from a year studying Greek at University College, London. Yet his experiments in diction and rhythm made him an important influence on twentieth-century poetry. Browning’s dramatic idyll “Pheidippides” gives credit to the Athenian foot racer for both the Athens to Sparta 150-mile run, as well as the shorter “Marathon” from the battleground to Athens. The poet pays tribute to Greece and Pheidippides:

First I salute this soil of the blessed, river and rock!
Gods of my birthplace, daemons and heroes, honor to all!
Then I name thee, claim thee for our patron,
co-equal in praise.

“Run, Pheidippides, run and race, reach Sparta for aid!” implores an animated Browning. The familiar story of this “best runner of Greece”—as Miltiades called him—culminates in a blending of heroic fact and legend:

Unforeseeing one! Yes, he fought on the Marathon day:
So, when Persia was dust, all cried “To Akropolis!
Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the mead [prize] is thy due!
‘Athens is saved, thank Pan,’ go shout!” He flung   
down his shield,
Ran like fire once more: and the space ‘twixt the Fennel-field
And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through,
Till in he broke:  “Rejoice, we conquer!”  Like wine through  clay,
Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died—the bliss!
So, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of salute
Is still “Rejoice!”—his word which brought rejoicing indeed.
So is Pheidippides happy forever,—the noble strong man
Who could race like a God, bear the face of a God, whom a God loved so well;
He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was
suffered to tell
Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began,
So to end gloriously—once to shout, thereafter be mute:
“Athens is saved!”—Pheidippides lies in the shout for his mead.23

Marathon poetry of less epic proportions continued into the present century.  Alice E. Hanscom’s “The Mound at Marathon,”24 Fred Jacob’s “The Marathon,”25 and “The Athenian Battlehymn at Marathon,”26 by Sir Francis Doyle, are examples. A recent novel—a skillful blending of ancient history and poetic license—is Marathon by Alan Lloyd. The author calls Pheidippides’ acknowledged run to Sparta “a feat in the best tradition of Greek athleticism.”27

The author conjectures that Pheidippides returned from Sparta and was in the Athenian phalanx at Marathon “wielding a burnished blade.” Lloyd concludes his tale by quoting Browning’s heroic version of the exhausted Pheidippides’ race from Marathon to Athens, the victory cry, and death. This last and most famous story has little historic substance, but is of enormous romantic proportions. Interesting historical vignettes continue to be associated with Marathon. For example, in 1895, a M. Dragoumis found in Salamis a stone which had long served as a doorstop to a peasant’s cottage, and which was inscribed with the epitaph:

Battling for Greece the Athenians at Marathon leveled the power of Persians, wearers of gold. With myriads three hundred here once fought from Peloponnesus thousands four.28

by John Apostal Lucas

*Originally printed in: The Amateur Athlete, 28 (November 1957), 10-13.

Reprinted with permission from: Lucas, John, John Apostal Lucas: Teacher, Sport Historian, and One Who Lived His Life Earnestly. A Collection of Articles and Essays with an Autobiographical Sketch. (Lemont, PA: Eifrig Publishing, 2009), p. 1-8.
 

Available for purchase at www.eifrigenterprises.com.

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John Lucas has dedicated his nearly half-century of academic life at Penn State University to researching and writing about his first love of sport, track and field, and the Olympics. 

He has attended every Summer Olympics since the 1960 Rome Games and has written several books, including Future of the Olympic Games.  From his over 200 monographs and articles, Lucas has selected a score of his articles written since 1953 for this anthology.  They cover the range of his academic interests.