Full Day Marathon Tour

Marathon is a wide flat plain between hills and the sea, and the reason the battle happened here is that it is the one place near Athens where cavalry could be landed and deployed. The Persians came ashore at Schinias, at the north end — now a pine forest and a beach.

Miltiades commanded the Athenians: about ten thousand of them, with a thousand Plataeans, against a Persian force that had been sent by Darius I and was commanded on the ground by Datis and Artaphernes. He thinned his centre and loaded his wings, let the middle give, and closed the wings in from both sides.

The Soros is the burial mound of the 192. It is the reason to come: not a monument built later to commemorate something, but the actual earth heaped over the actual men, standing on the plain for two and a half thousand years. When it was excavated in the nineteenth century, they found the ash layer and the burnt bones.

The Athens Classic Marathon starts here every November and finishes in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens — which you can see on our Athens city tours.

Everyone knows the story: a runner named Pheidippides carried the news from Marathon to Athens, said “we have won,” and died.

Herodotus does not mention it. He wrote thirty or forty years after the battle, closer to it than we are to the moon landings, and he records exactly one run — and it is a better one.

Before the battle, Athens sent Pheidippides to Sparta to ask for help. He covered roughly 240 kilometres on foot across the mountains of the Peloponnese and arrived, Herodotus says, on the second day. The Spartans said yes, but they could not march until the full moon. He ran back.

That is nearly six times a marathon, in each direction, and he lived. The Marathon-to-Athens death run appears centuries later, and the sources cannot agree on who did it — Plutarch calls him Eucles or Thersippus; Lucian calls him Philippides. The name attached to it now belongs to the man who ran to Sparta.

Modern runners settled the argument in 1983 by trying it: the Spartathlon covers 246 kilometres from Athens to Sparta and gives you 36 hours. Most people do not finish.

And the marathon distance? 42.195 kilometres has nothing to do with Greece at all. Marathon to Athens is about 40 km, which is what they ran in 1896. The modern distance was set at the 1908 London Olympics, when the start was moved back to sit beneath the windows of the royal nursery at Windsor Castle and the finish was shifted to face the royal box. It stuck.