Marathon Private Tour – 6 Hours

Pickup from your hotel for a six-hour tour to Marathon — an hour north of Athens, on a plain between the hills and the sea, where in 490 BC an outnumbered Athenian army stopped a Persian invasion and bent the direction of European history.

The Persians came ashore at Schinias, at the north end of the bay: a force sent by Darius I and commanded on the ground by his generals Datis and Artaphernes. Against it Athens put about ten thousand citizens and a thousand Plataeans, under Miltiades. The Athenian democracy was twenty years old. Nobody expected it to last the afternoon.

Miltiades thinned his centre and strengthened his wings, let the middle give way, and then closed in from both sides. Herodotus counted 192 Athenian dead and 6,400 Persian.

And then the city did something extraordinary. Instead of carrying its dead home, Athens buried them where they fell, under a great mound of earth on the plain. The Soros is still there. You can walk around it in three minutes, and it is the reason to come.

The story everyone knows is what happened next: a runner named Pheidippides carried the news to Athens, announced the victory, and died. It is a wonderful story, but Herodotus — writing only a few decades after the battle — does not mention it.

What he does record is better. Before the fighting, Athens sent Pheidippides to Sparta to ask for help: roughly 240 kilometres across the mountains. He arrived, Herodotus says, on the second day. The Spartans agreed to help, but could not march until the full moon. Pheidippides returned to Athens. Six times a marathon, there and back — and he lived.

As for the distance, 42.195 kilometres has nothing to do with Marathon itself. Marathon to Athens is about forty kilometres, roughly the distance run at the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896. The number we use today was fixed at the 1908 London Games, when the start was moved back to Windsor Castle so the royal family could watch, and the finish was placed in front of the royal box. The distance stuck.

The road out of Athens broadly follows the route of the ancient road, and the Athens Marathon — the Authentic — still runs it every November, starting near the Tomb of the Athenians at Marathon and finishing in the Panathenaic Stadium in the city.

But Marathon is not only the battle. It sits on a long coast of beaches, tavernas and marinas, and it is where Athenians drive out for lunch on a Sunday — which, after two and a half thousand years, is its own kind of answer.