The Athenians and their allies, under the generalship of Callimachus and Miltiades,
marched out to meet them. The Greeks faced the Persian host, which greatly
outnumbered them, with a long battle line weak at the centre and strong on the wings.
Asthe Persians broke through the centre they were encircled and routed with losses
reported by Herodotus to be well over 6,000 as against 192 Athenians (6, 117). The
latter is likely to be correct as their names were inscribed on a monument at the site.
The Spartans, who had been celebrating a religious festival when requests for aid
came to them from Athens, arrived with a force of 2,000, too late for the battle. The
Persians returned home, abandoning their present expedition. In 487 the newly
confident Athenian assembly used the provision of ostracism for the first time against
Hipparchus, a descendant of the family of Peisistratus, now permanently tainted by
their support for the Persian cause.
Preparations for a second and larger Persian expedition were made by Xerxes,
the son of Darius, in the next decade. He had a vast army of perhaps 100,000 troops,
58 THE GREEKS
FIGURE 15 The plain of Marathon (with the sea in the left-hand corner) and site of the
battle, fought from left to right, with the Greeks in formation in the foothills and the
Persians in the foreground. Athens is just over 26 miles to the west-south-west. Legend
has it that the runner Pheidippides ran from Athens to join the battle, then ran back
(the distance of the ‘marathon’) to deliver the news of the victory with the words ‘Victory:
we win’, whereupon he dropped dead
Source: Courtesy of R. V. Schroder