The Road to Sparta

by Dean Karnazes

  And so did his fellow countrymen. Onward they rushed toward the Bay of Phaleron.

  As the Greeks ran to head them off, the Persian oarsmen pulled at their paddle handles, whips lashing those who showed fatigue. The Persian leaders drove each man to complete exhaustion, and when they crumpled on the boat’s wooden planks, they were dragged away and replaced with another. The only concern of these leaders was launching a counterattack on the city of Athens; the welfare of their men meant nothing. There was plenty of this resource to go around.

  Dusk was falling as the Persian fleet rounded the final headland. The rowers pulled steadily, under orders to come ashore along the northern beaches of the cove. As they approached the landing site within the bay, they noticed something coming over the ridge on the cliffs above. It was a Greek hoplite. First there was one, then another. And still others appeared. More and more Greeks began arriving until the entire clifftop was lined with men three deep.

  The Persian leaders cursed! As terribly as they wanted to squash these blasted Hellenes, they weren’t willing to make landing at a disadvantaged battle position in the face of a large, determined, and victorious force of hoplite warriors. They had no choice but to order their ships about and paddle away in retreat. It was another crushing defeat for the Persians, another mortal wound to a previously invincible power. They would have a long slog back to Persia to mull over this implausible upset victory by the Greeks.

  The Greeks cheered and clasped arms as they watched the Persian warships slowly receding off into the distance. General Miltiades’s sentiments remained a bit more subdued, however, for he realized that news of the failed Persian conquest would enrage King Darius. Watching the Persian warships fading off into the distance was not the end of things, Miltiades feared; it was just the beginning. Despite the Greek triumph that day, he thought about the ramifications their success would bring. The Persians would be back, and future wars were sure to ensue. Miltiades was saddened by this knowledge. As Herodotus wrote: “No one is so foolish as to prefer war to peace. In peace children bury their fathers, while in war fathers bury their children.” Miltiades knew that many fathers would be burying their children when the Persians eventually came back.

  Meanwhile in Athens, the citizenry debated the most appropriate course of action to take in the midst of swirling uncertainty. Had the Persians slaughtered the Greeks at Marathon? Were they now en route to the city to rape, pillage, and enslave the remaining Athenian citizens? If the Persians had been successful in their conquest at Marathon, remaining in Athens posed grave danger, for they would stand no chance against these barbaric foreign invaders. Should they flee the city? There had been many sleepless nights in Athens, especially by those mothers who gazed worriedly at their children, wondering if the Persian butchers had savagely cut down their fathers. There could be no rest until they knew with certainty what had happened at Marathon.

  Just then a sentry on lookout spotted something moving over the horizon. It was a ghostly figure, a man swaying and staggering, tripping and stumbling along, though picking himself back up and continuing onward. Who was this person? The sentry looked closer for telltale signs of identity but couldn’t make out much detail. One thing was for certain: It was not the enemy. And even if it were, this individual was in no shape to put up a fight.

  Pheidippides’s perceptions flitted between light and dark. Interludes of hazy lucidity revealed a landscape veneered in silvery metallic hues, as if a river of liquid mercury had poured down from the sky embossing the earth. Waves of translucent ripples percolated upward from the ground, the surface rising and falling fluidly underfoot. A cathartic trill echoed within his ears like that of a thousand angels crying, his body drifting reflexively onward. Before him, on a hill high above, stood a heavenly formation of cottony alabaster, a sanctity of peace towering in the clouds majestically, as if home to the gods. That was where he must go, he understood. Up these streets in which he’d played as a child, to this place above the world. One more ascent to that sacred mountaintop temple and then, at long last, he could have his rest.

  Others were awaiting his arrival at the Acropolis, a solitary figure gliding phantom-like through the hallowed entranceway and onto the main grounds. They watched transfixed, unsure of what to do, unsure of what would happen next, as this angel-like form made its way toward the gathered group. The air was eerily still, motionless, as he came before them, pulling up directly in front of the assemblage and bringing himself to a halt. They stared, amazed by his presence, inspecting his body and his mental constitution, assessing his state of being. There was a dreamlike moment of pause, when time seemed suspended. What would transpire in the next moments?

  Pheidippides tried to mount a response, but nothing came. He tried again, to no avail. His body was nearly lifeless, seemingly incapable of anything more. Others moved to his aid but were held back by their fellow Athenians.

  In a final consecrated act of determination, Pheidippides drew in his breath, seized all his might, and burst forth: “Nike! Nike!” (Victory! Victory!) “Nenikekamen!” (Rejoice, we conquer!) he cried out, proudly thrusting both arms into the air in a show of defiance and pride.

  A palpable sense of ease rushed over the crowd, the tension of days of anguished waiting released and washed away in an instant. However, there was no outward celebration, no open expressions of joy or delight. All present felt an uplifting sensation that Greece had been saved, but no one could take their eyes off this travel-weary hemerodromos standing before them. His once powerful and ever-enduring frame was now terribly withered and depleted, yet there was nothing they could do. It was past that point. They watched as he gradually lowered to one knee, and then to the other. His body gracefully folded onto the ground, toppling earthward and twisting softly sideways to come to a rest upon its back, his eyes and heart facing skyward. He peered longingly into the distant universe as the twilight of his life passed before him, those last magnificent glimmering rays of sunlight slowly fading to black. He drew in a final precious breath of warm, sweet air, a gentle smile spread across his face, and then his eyes slid silently shut. Finally, at long last, Pheidippides would have his rest. Eternal and forever rest, rest in peace.

  CONCLUSION

  The Spartans eventually arrived in Athens and learned of the battle’s outcome. They were impressed by the Athenian victory, yet General Miltiades warned that the triumph at Marathon would not spell the end of Persia’s thirst for Greek blood. He was right: A decade after the Battle of Marathon, in 480 BCE, Persian King Darius’s son Xerxes invaded Greece. At the famous Battle of Thermopylae, the Spartans lived up to their fearless reputation. Under the leadership of Spartan King Leonidas, a group of a mere 300 elite mountain warriors went to battle against a huge contingency of Persians numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Xerxes demanded that the Spartans lay down their arms, to which King Leonidas replied with but two words, Molon labe (come and take them).

  Xerxes’s messenger threatened that if the Greeks did not surrender, the Persians would attack with the full brunt of their military might. He said the sheer mass of their archers’ incoming arrows would blot out the sun, to which the Spartan warrior Dienekes appreciatively replied, “So much the better; then we shall fight our battle in the shade.”

  The Persian messenger went on, “We will destroy you, and we will capture your women.”

  “Hah!” the Spartan laughed. “You do not know our women.”

  On the morning of the battle, Leonidas advised his men to eat a hearty breakfast, “for tonight we dine in the underworld,” he told them. Three hundred Spartans held strong at Thermopylae. “AROO! AROO! AROO!” was their battle cry as they fearsomely stood their ground, watching the endless throng of Persians advancing upon them. Many armies have made the claim that they would fight to the death, but usually death comes with no other alternative. If given an opportunity to flee, others have, but not the Spartans. Even when the option of retreat existed, they chose instead to stay and fight. T
hey fought with their shields and their thrusting spears. And when those were stripped from them, they fought with their knives. And when those were stripped from them, they fought with their bare hands. And when they were cut to the ground and lay dying, they fought with their teeth. These men lived large, and although they lost the battle of Thermopylae to the Persians that day, all 300 Spartans died with valor, making the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of preserving the freedom of others. Flesh will eventually return to earth; the end is the same for all humankind. To a Spartan, a noble life cut short was preferable to a withering existence of quiet desperation. Either way, the final destination was identical. At the battlefield of Thermopylae an everlasting epitaph to those Spartans who lost their lives on that day poignantly reads:

  GO TELL THE SPARTANS,

  STRANGER PASSING BY, THAT HERE,

  OBEDIENT TO THEIR LAWS, WE LIE.

  And thus we are once again reminded that dying is part of living, that without death there would be no life, without darkness there would be no light. From a thorn a rose emerges and from a rose a thorn. The ancient Greeks lived close to these dualisms, honest and in celebration of the insuperable realities of existence, both the glorious and the tragic. “Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued,” Socrates said shortly before drinking the poisonous hemlock. Only when the unbearable sorrow of our doomed fate is recognized and embraced can we see the true beauty in things and live a life beyond the ordinary. We worship the gods because they are immortal, but the gods envy us because we are not. Theirs is a race with no finish line, an endless string of days and nights stretching on for eternity. The gods observed that human mortality is what gives life magic, that the tragedy of inevitable death is preferable to the sameness of forever life. An existence that stretches on indefinitely is not a blessing, they realized, but a curse.

  Here, at this juncture, let us take a moment to examine the historical significance of Pheidippides’s feat and the Battle of Marathon. What would have happened if Pheidippides had failed to reach Sparta or had been incapable of running back from Sparta to Marathon? Here’s what plausibly may have happened. Upon receiving midnight news that the Persians were planning on deploying half their troops up to the Bay of Phaleron to launch a bifurcated offensive, the Athenians who were hunkered down in the hillsides above Marathon would have prudently retreated back to Athens. Doing so offered a better defense strategy against a two-sided Persian attack, and because they believed Pheidippides and the Spartans would be arriving shortly, it made all the more sense to abandon their current position and retreat to Athens. Hence, there would have been no battle at Marathon.

  This is no trivial matter. For if Pheidippides had failed in his ultramarathon conquest, what has been called the most critical battle in world history might never have occurred. Without word from Pheidippides that the Spartans were delayed, the Athenians would have returned back to the city only to wait in vain for the Spartans. Pheidippides provided a key piece of military intelligence that prevented such a chain of events from occurring, and thus the battle was ultimately waged at Marathon. This profound revelation has been hiding in plain sight for the past 2,500 years, perhaps only waiting for someone to tear into the history books and examine the record through the lens of an ultramarathoner. Pheidippides’s historic run, quite literally, saved the world.

  Now, historians are always reluctant to speculate on what would have happened had the outcome of a particular event been different, but I am not a historian. What would have happened had there been no Battle of Marathon and the Persians successfully overthrew the Greeks in Athens? The world as we know it would be a very different place, that is for sure. The liberal enlightenment of Western society and the gradual ascendancy of the great principles that cultivated European civilization would have been lost. The nascent ideology of democracy would have vanished, possibly forever, and the burgeoning ideal of self-governance by the people would have been thrust back into the dark ages of Persian totalitarianism. The great ancient works of Greek art and architecture would not exist. There would be no Parthenon, no Myron, and no Iktinus. Pythagoras and his theorem would disappear, and the development of modern mathematics and engineering would have suffered as a consequence. Plato would be gone, as would Aristotle. Drama, tragic comedy, and story development would have evolved very differently, if at all. So much of the way we live our lives today has its roots in that prolific period of human development following the Battle of Marathon. And, most important for us runners, had Pheidippides failed in his conquest, we would have no marathon.

  Those men who fought on the plains of Marathon and then ran along the coastline to the Bay of Phaleron to head off the Persian counterattack became legends. Known as the marathonomachoi, they were revered throughout the land. The victory at Marathon became a defining event in Greek history. Dramatic depictions of the battle were displayed in friezes on the Temple of Nike at the Acropolis. Even as the years passed, the marathonomachoi were distinguished from others. “Veterans of Marathon, tough as oak or maple,” Aristophanes described them.

  In a modern incarnation of the marathonomachoi, the so-called Grizzled Vets are a small group of marathoners who have completed each of the 30 successive Big Sur International Marathons, completing one of the toughest 26.2-mile courses along the California coastline from Big Sur to Carmel in procession over 3 decades. Which brings us to the question: Why 26.2? Why has that particular distance become the modern-day standard for the marathon? Why are we not running something like 300 miles, the distance Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta and back?

  The answer probably has to do with the outcome of that final run from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens. You see, Pheidippides was a hemerodromos, and running great distances is what hemerodromoi did. It might seem remarkable to us today that a man could cover such a vast distance on foot, but that was the role of an ancient Greek herald. In essence, when Pheidippides ran to Sparta and back, he was just doing his job. As I mentioned earlier, Herodotus never emphasized this extraordinary feat of endurance and stamina as being anything out of the ordinary, and modern scholars have largely adopted that same position without much analysis, which some might say is a glaring oversight, especially anyone who has ever attempted to run such a distance.

  At any rate, 600 years after the fact, the historians Plutarch and Lucian didn’t focus on Pheidippides’s run to Sparta and back but instead drew attention to that final run from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens.1 Why highlight this shorter run when a much greater feat of athleticism occurred in Pheidippides’s round-trip run from Athens to Sparta? Here’s the answer: Because in that final jaunt from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens, the messenger died at the conclusion. To the ancient Greeks, nothing could be nobler than tragically dying after performing a heroic deed for one’s country. It was the highest possible calling.

  The 18th-century British poet Robert Browning captured this quintessence in dramatic, lyrical style:

  So, when Persia was dust, all cried, “To Acropolis!

  Run, Pheidippides, one more race! The meed is thy due! Athens is saved, thank Pan, go shout!”

  He flung down his shield and ran like fire once more: and the space ’twixt the fennel-field

  And Athens was stubble again, a field with fire runs through,

  Till in he broke: “Rejoice, we conquer!” Like wine through the clay,

  Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died—the bliss!

  The legend of a man dying after a gallant act of valor is what perpetuated through the ages, and this is the story that we’re left with today. Along the way, facts have been distorted, names have been altered, and circumstances rearranged to hold the narrative, as is the case with many great historic tales. This is how the enduring lore of Marathon as we now know it came to evolve.

  Still, why 26.2? The true distance from Marathon to Athens on the pathway an ancient foot messenger would have traveled was closer to 25 miles. So how did we eventually settle on 26.
2? The evolution of this story has its twists and turns as well.

  It begins with the end of the ancient Olympics in 394 CE. The original Greek Olympic movement was conceived as an event in which all citizens participated, regardless of one’s status or profession. Athletic competition was part of being Greek, something cherished and prized, and everyone joined in the Games and took part. Yes, the winners were recognized, but participation by all was chiefly valued, and everyone who competed received the same laurel or olive-branch wreath.

  Over time, however, this founding spirit began to falter, and professionalism and elitism crept into the Games. Originally all athletes were amateurs and trained only in their spare time, but suddenly professionally paid athletes were entering the games, sometimes sponsored by the wealthy citizen class. As the years progressed, the Olympics lost their way entirely and became more about cutthroat competition and winning at all costs. Intense rivalries, even hatreds, developed among athletes of different sporting disciplines who were all vying for the limelight in an effort to gain notoriety over one another. Ironically, it was a Roman emperor, Theodosius I, not a Greek, who abolished the Games. His reason for doing so was that the Games had deteriorated into a ritualistic spectacle rather than a sporting event.

  Equally ironic, it was a French nobleman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, not a Greek, who revived the Games in 1896 when the first modern Olympics were held in Athens. De Coubertin sought to bring back the spirit of the original games. Sounding like an ancient Greek scholar, the Frenchman wrote, “The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part; the important thing in life is not triumph, but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.” In an even stranger twist of plot, a marathon run was introduced in these modern Games and became the premier attraction, even though no footrace of such duration had existed during the original ancient Greek Olympics. The marathon race was the final anchor event of these modern Games, and the distance was set at 24.85 miles following the ancient route from the plains of Marathon to Athens. Perhaps providentially, a Greek athlete, Spiridon Louis, won this first marathon.