490 BC

Battle of Marathon

Athenians and Plataeans defeat Darius' expedition at Marathon

The famous finish-line messenger is not in Herodotus. His runner went from Athens to Sparta before the battle; it was the army that had to hurry back to Athens after it.

490 BCE: a deliberately thin center

A Persian expedition commanded by Datis and Artaphernes landed on the plain of Marathon in 490 BCE. The Athenian army confronted it there and was joined by the Plataeans. Darius, who had ordered the expedition, was not present.

The Greek line put the polemarch Callimachus on the right and the Plataeans on the left. Its center was only a few ranks deep so that its frontage matched the Persian line, which left both wings stronger.

The center breaks

After favorable sacrifices the Greeks advanced at a run — at least eight stadia, roughly 1.5 kilometres, in Herodotus's account, though whether they ran the whole distance is debated.

The Persian and Saka center broke through the weaker Greek center. The Greek wings defeated the troops opposite them and then turned against the Persian center. The thin middle was not a trap that sprang: it genuinely broke, and was pursued.

The race back to Athens

The defeated troops fled toward their ships, and in the fighting at the shore the Athenians captured seven vessels while the rest escaped. Callimachus was killed.

The Persian fleet then sailed around Cape Sunium toward Phaleron. The Athenian army hurried back, arrived first and encamped at Cynosarges; finding it already in position, the fleet stayed briefly off Phaleron and then returned to Asia.

Herodotus reports 192 Athenian dead and 6,400 Persian, the latter a precision nobody can verify. The Spartans had not refused to come — he says they agreed but would not march before the full moon, and arrived after the battle.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 8 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The year 490 BCE is secure, but the precise day is not. September 12 is conventional; August 12 has been proposed because the reconstruction depends on how the Spartan and Athenian lunar calendars are aligned.
Herodotus is the earliest continuous surviving account, but he wrote decades afterward and does not give Greek or Persian troop totals.
The Persian cavalry disappears from Herodotus’ battle narrative. Whether it had embarked, was absent temporarily or participated unmentioned remains a major scholarly dispute.
Herodotus reports the casualty figures, but his exact Persian total—6,400—is not independently verifiable.