be of any assistance to the Athenians. The battle of Marathon had already been fought and lost – by the
Persians.
“This is grain-bearing Gela’s memorial to Aeschylus the Athenian, late son of Euphorion. The
hallowed ground of Marathon could tell of his glorious valor, as could the long-haired Persian, who
knows all too well.” (Epigrammata Graeca 454–7, Page, epitaph for the tragic poet Aeschylus)The defeat of the Persian forces by the Athenians and Plataeans at Marathon in the late summer of 490 BC
was the last thing anyone could have expected. The Athenians were convinced that they had been
successful because they were a free people fighting against a horde of servile barbarians whose will was
enervated by their subservience to a despotic master. They were further convinced that the gods that they
worshipped played a significant role in securing their victory. (It is worth noting that in all of human
history a vanquished army has never taken its defeat to be evidence of the inefficacy of its gods.) Modern
scholars prefer to explain the outcome of the battle of Marathon in terms of the Greeks’ superiority to the
Persians in discipline and equipment. Over the previous 200 years, the Greeks had become accustomed to
the discipline and coordination required by the tactics of hoplite warfare. For this reason, Greek
mercenaries were recruited in the seventh and sixth centuries to serve in the Babylonian and the Egyptian
armies. Hoplite tactics had led to the development of bronze protective armor and long thrusting-spears
that turned out to bemore than a match for the less substantial equipment of the Persians (figure 36), who
were accustomed to relying on their superior numbers to overwhelm their opponents. Of course, the
Greeks would not have considered their own explanation and that of modern scholars as mutually
exclusive alternatives: The Greeks’ superior discipline could be attributed to their independence and self-
determination, just as the Persians’ lack of self-control was surely a result of their subjection to an
absolute ruler, and Greek armorers were undoubtedly more pious, and therefore more successful, than
their Persian counterparts.