Battle of Marathon | Animated History

It is a bright sunny day on the beautiful Greek island of Euboea, but the city of Eretria is burning. Foreign soldiers maraud through the streets, looting and destroying temples, setting fire to houses, and abducting any civilians they find to sell into slavery. Eretria is utterly destroyed, but this act of brutality will not satisfy the attacker's thirst for vengeance. They have one more city to burn. Hi, I'm Griffin Johnson, the Armchair Historian. Today's video, the Battle of Marathon. A battle that saw the forces of the city-state of Athens and its allies face off against the might of the Persian Empire. Pop culture tends to portray Marathon as a glorious triumph of the brave heroes of the western democracy, soundly defeating the evil forces of eastern tyranny. But in reality, the Battle of Marathon was far more complicated, further muddied by many conflicting historical accounts. Now, let's dive in. Our story begins in 490 BCE, the year that Persian king Darius I dispatched an armada of 600 ships carrying an army of 26,000 disciplined soldiers into the Aegean. The expedition set out to destroy or subjugate several Greek islands and city-states, but their main targets were the cities of Athens and Eretria. The reason? Nine years before, those two cities had sent troops and ships to support a rebellion of several Greek cities in the Persian Empire, a conflict known as the Ionian Revolt. The revolt was eventually crushed, but not before Ionian forces captured and destroyed the Persian city of Sardis. The fiery destruction of Eretria was not a random act of aggression, but one of retribution, a city for a city. But Darius' expedition was not solely motivated by revenge. The Athenians and Eretrians had not only helped burn a Persian city, they had presented a challenge to the Persian king's authority. Darius, having spent years securing his throne after usurping it in 522, could not let such a challenge stand. He demanded payback. The army he assembled to do the job was led by generals Datis and Artophanes. Consisting of light infantry and heavy cavalry, the Persian troops were drawn from all over the vast, multicultural Persian Empire. Before pursuing their main goals, the Persian force spent some time island hopping across the Aegean Sea. Beyond simple conquest and securing supply lines, taking the islands allowed the Persian generals to engage in a bit of propaganda. After burning the defiant city of Naxos and enslaving its inhabitants, the Persian fleet sailed to Delos, which surrendered immediately. Datis proceeded to make lavish sacrifices to the Greek god Apollo before leaving the occupied city intact. Soon after, the Persians reached a defiant Eretria, and we all know how that went. The message was clear. Surrender would be respected, but resistance would be crushed. After destroying Eretria, the Persian forces sailed down the coast of Attica and landed at the plain of Marathon, about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, northeast of Athens. And it is here that the fate of Athenian independence would be decided. The Athenians scrambled to respond, hastily dispatching their army from the city to intercept the vast Persian force before it could establish a foothold on the Greek mainland. The Greeks arrived with a force numbering about 11,000 hoplite infantry, 10,000 from Athens, and 1,000 provided by their ally, Plataea. The Athenian soldiers, in keeping with Athens' then newly established democratic traditions, were led by 10 generals, one from each of the 10 tribes of Athens. In addition, there was one senior general, or polemarch, in charge of all the tribal commanders. At this time, the polemarch was a man named Callimachus, about whom very little is known. Likewise, most of the tribal commanders are unknown, with the exception of a rather famous character by the name of Miltiades. Miltiades was born in Athens in 550 BCE to a noble family, and in 516 he came to rule over a Greek city on what is now the Gallipoli Peninsula in Anatolia. Miltiades served for a few years as a Persian vassal after Darius I conquered the region, but fled to Athens after falling out of favor with the king. Ancient accounts claim that the other generals at Marathon all deferred to Miltiades, given his first-hand knowledge of Persian tactics. But there is reason to be skeptical of this detail. Miltiades' son Simon was a leading figure in Athenian politics in the decades after the battle. With this in mind, it's easy to see why we know so much about Miltiades, and why we should take some of the claims about him with a grain of salt. When the Greeks arrived at Marathon, they quickly moved to block the Persian army from advancing further inland. As soon as they set up their camp, the Greeks realized they were at a serious disadvantage. Their army had no cavalry or skilled archers to match those in the Persian army, and they were outnumbered more than two to one. Looking to even the odds, the Athenians sent a runner to request reinforcements from Sparta. And great news! The Spartans agreed to send aid, but not right away. An important religious festival was ongoing at the time, and the Spartans couldn't interrupt the festival by going to war without breaking divine law. The Spartans may have taken war very seriously, but they were just as serious about their parties. Therefore, the Athenians couldn't expect Spartan reinforcements for another 10 days. At this point, both sides were reluctant to force an engagement. Despite Persia's superior numbers and flexible army composition, the Greeks boasted a strong defensive position in the hills, with both of their flanks secure. The bristling spears of the Greek phalanx also presented a very persuasive argument against a direct assault. And likewise, the widely feared heavy cavalry and trained archers of the Persians presented an equally persuasive argument against a Greek assault across the plain. A retreat back to the safety of Athens' walls might have made strategic sense at this point, but it was politically unsafe. Miltiades and Callimachus knew that there was a strong faction in Athens that supported Persia, and wanted to turn the city over in exchange for mercy and political power for themselves. The commanders needed a decisive victory over the Persians at Marathon to silence these sympathizers. Retreat was not an option, and so the two armies simply waited, staring each other down for eight days straight. This delay benefited the Greeks much more than the Persians, as every day they waited brought the Spartan army closer, and the Persians only had so much food to sustain their large army. What finally broke the stalemate is uncertain. Ancient sources are divided on the details, and modern historians haven't been able to reach a consensus either. We do know two things though, that the Greeks most likely attacked the Persians, and the Persian cavalry was not present for the battle. The question of where the Persian horses went has been debated by scholars for centuries, and there are two main theories. The cavalry was either re-embarked, or it had been sent away from the rest of the army to forage. Equally uncertain is why the Greeks chose to attack when they did. Ancient sources, again, contradict each other, but it is likely that something forced the Greeks to attack, be it the threat to Athens from the Persians re-embarking, or seeing an opportunity in the cavalry being sent away. Whatever the case, the cavalry was gone, and Miltiades seized the initiative. He ordered the army into formation, stretching out his forces to match the width of the Persian line by thinning the center ranks and concentrating his troops on the flanks. The long line and thickened flanks were meant to prevent the larger Persian army from enveloping the smaller Greek force in melee. If the Greeks were surrounded, they would be slaughtered. Having arranged his forces, Miltiades promptly began the attack. The Greeks marched steadily across most of the 1,500 meter or 4,900 foot gap between them and the Persians. Then, upon entering the roughly 200 meter or 650 foot effective range of the Persian archers, the Greeks surprised the Persians by breaking into a full run toward the enemy. Thanks to their large shields, armor, and the momentum of their charge, the Greeks were able to shrug off most of the Persian arrows as they ran, and soon entered melee with the enemy. For a moment, it seemed as though Miltiades' attack would fail however. Since the Greek center ranks were thinner, the Persians were able to break through the line there and push forward. But the thicker Greek flanks succeeded in starting a route, allowing them to attack the advancing Persian force from the sides and the rear, enveloping a happy accident. Miltiades' tactic to avoid envelopment by the Persians had allowed the Greeks to envelop their enemies instead, and soon they inflicted heavy losses by doing so. The envelopment broke the Persians' morale, and soon a rout among the entire Persian force started. As they quickly began retreating to their ships, all the while the Greeks continued to slaughter them. By the time the Persians had withdrawn, 6,400 of them lay dead by either drowning in the nearby marsh to escape, or by being cut down in the retreat. By comparison, the Athenians lost a measly 192 men. But among the Greek dead was the pole march, Callimachus, who, according to legend, died with so many Persian spears through his body that he remained upright after death. Though the Greeks had won a remarkable victory at Marathon, they had no time to celebrate. The rest of the Persian army was now sailing toward a defenseless Athens, and the Greeks had to march through the night to make it back to the city in time to protect it. They arrived just in time to see the Persian ships approaching. Finding the city fully defended, Dades turned his fleet around and abandoned the expedition, ending the First Greco-Persian War. While the Persian expedition had successfully annihilated Eretria and expanded the territory of the Persian Empire, the surprising victory by the Athenians at Marathon carried huge symbolic importance. The Athenians capitalized on this using widespread propaganda across the Greek world to inflate the importance of their relatively minor victory. As a result, the influence and prestige of Athens grew exponentially after Marathon, propelling them to prominence among the city-states of Greece. You may be wondering by now what this ancient battle has to do with the Marathon race. Well, the legend goes that after the Battle of Marathon, the Greeks needed to let the people of Athens know that the Persians had been defeated to prevent the pro-Persian faction from surrendering the city. So, they sent a runner back to Athens to announce the victory. The messenger ran a whole 26 miles, or 42 kilometers, back to Athens, proclaimed the Greeks had won, and then immediately died of exhaustion. True or not, the story was compelling enough that 2,000 years later, the planners of the first modern Olympics used it as inspiration for the Marathon race. Although the truth of what happened at Marathon is clouded by time, propaganda, and conflicting accounts, it is undeniable that the Athenians overcame the odds to push back the Persian army. But in the grand scheme of things, the Battle of Marathon was little more than a small skirmish within a much larger conflict. The Battle of Marathon looms so large in history today only because the Athenians wanted it to. Proclaiming themselves the saviors of Greece allowed the Athenians to dominate it themselves. If you want to learn more about the greater context of the Greco-Persian Wars, then I can highly recommend you watch a video over on Invicta's channel. Hey Invicta, could you tell us what you'll be covering? Persians had this quantity, millions upon millions of these chaff-type troops who butted heads against the small but elite Greeks. And that's kind of a simple narrative. But in my video, we dive into the details of why that's not necessarily accurate. So we are going to look at comparative army qualities, we're going to be looking at troop numbers over the course of the war, and then also we're going to be looking at battle performance and track record. So there's a lot of factors that are, you know, kind of hidden below this surface level narrative, and that's what we're gonna be getting into in my video. So if that's something that interests you, definitely check it out.