The Battle of Marathon

Sources

Background . In 499 b.c.e. the Ionian Greeks, those residing on the coast of Asia Minor and various islands in the Aegean Sea, rebelled against their Persian overlords. Some of the Greek city-states were sympathetic to the plight of the rebels during these early Persian Wars, and Athens and Eretria sent military aid in the form of warships. Nevertheless, the Persian king Darius I crushed the rebellion by 494 and then decided to chastise the interfering Greek city-states. In the case of the Athenians, he wished to reimpose on them the rule of the tyrant Hippias, who had been forced from Athens twenty-one years before. In the summer of 490 b.c.e. a Persian army of approximately 26,000 men landed in Greece; while one-half of the force laid siege to Eritrea on the island of Euboea, the remainder bivouacked twenty-six miles north of Athens at Marathon.

Persian Forces . The army of Darius I was composed of troops from many regions of the Persian empire. The regular professional soldiers were the Medes, Elamites, and a group of royal guards known as the Immortals. They were armed with bows and would fire arrows at their enemies before engaging in close combat with short spears and daggers. Although they had wicker shields, they wore no protective armor, as did the Greek heavy infantry. The Persian cavalry, made up of excellent horsemen such as the Medes, Elamites, Bactrians, and Sakai, also was armed with bows, although the Sakai carried axes as well.

Greek Forces . The Athenians gathered an army of ten thousand troops, including one thousand Plataeans, and placed them under the command of an experienced general, Miltiades. Although the Spartans were invited to join with their highly trained soldiers, they hesitated to send any aid. The Greek infantrymen who participated in the Battle of Marathon were called hoplites, so named because they carried round shields known as hopla. The hoplites were heavy infantrymen, meaning that they carried long thrusting spears (eight to ten feet in length) and iron swords and wore plate armor and helmets. Hoplites fought in a phalanx, a large rectangular formation which had between six and eight ranks. Troops in a phalanx relied on shock action to defeat enemy forces. As the soldiers moved closer to the enemy, the first few ranks would level their spears while interlocking shields to protect the formation.

The Engagement . In late September 490 Miltiades and his men formed for battle on the heights above the Persian encampment on the bay of Marathon. The Athenian phalanx attacked so swiftly that the Persians, their backs to the sea, had little time to react and use their bows before being overrun by the hoplites. In a stunning victory, the Greeks roundly defeated the Persians and killed thousands of the invaders. Marathon was the first time that a Western army had beaten an Eastern army, and it proved the military worth of hoplites over lightly armed troops.

Sources

Larry H. Addington, The Patterns of War through the Eighteenth Century (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).

Peter Green, The Greco-Persian Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Herodotus, The Histories, translated by W. Blanco and J. Roberts (New York: Norton, 1992).

Malcolm F. McGregor, The Athenians and Their Empire (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987).

Russell Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

Richard A. Preston, and others, Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western Society (Fort Worth, Tex.: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1991).