Key takeaways
- Herodotus has Pheidippides run to Sparta, about 240 km, not from Marathon.
- The Marathon-to-Athens run appears in much later writers.
- The standard 42.195 km distance dates from 1908, fixed in 1921.
Every year millions run marathons in honour of a Greek messenger who sprinted from the battlefield to Athens, announced a victory, and died. It is among the most celebrated stories in sport. It is also a story that gets the sources wrong, and the more accurate version is arguably more astonishing.
What Herodotus said
Our earliest account of the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE is by Herodotus, writing about fifty years later. He tells us that before the battle, the Athenians sent a runner named Pheidippides to Sparta to request help, a distance of roughly 240 kilometres, covered in about two days. He says Pheidippides reported meeting the god Pan on the way. Herodotus does not say that anyone ran from Marathon to Athens, and he does not mention a death.
The later legend
The version that links the battle to a single exhausted run appears centuries later, in Plutarch and in Lucian, who even gives the runner a different name. By then the story had been shaped by the needs of storytellers: a clean ending, a symbolic death, a single image that explained a great victory. The facts in Herodotus are less neat and more remarkable.
How the race was invented
The modern marathon was designed for the first Olympics of the modern era in 1896. The French linguist Michel Bréal proposed a long road race to commemorate the legend, and the Greek runner Spyridon Louis won it. The distance varied for years. At the London Games of 1908 it was set at 26 miles and 385 yards, reportedly to run from Windsor Castle to the royal box, and in 1921 the figure of 42.195 kilometres became standard.
Editorial assessment
The race is a splendid invention, and nobody needs the legend to enjoy it. But treating a nineteenth-century tradition as an ancient fact makes us poorer historians. The real Pheidippides ran extraordinary distances in the service of his city and was probably not the symbol we have made of him. Sometimes the corrected story deserves to be told precisely because it is the harder one.
Questions to think about
- Does the better story deserve to win over the better evidence?
- How do modern sports invent traditions to make themselves feel ancient?
Disagree? Say why in the discussion below. Good arguments change minds.
References and sources
- Herodotus, Histories, Book 6
- Michel Bréal and the 1896 Athens Olympic organisers; see David Martin and Roger Gynn, The Olympic Marathon (2000)
Discussion
Challenge the argument, not the person. Community guidelines
