The flower of western civilization burst into full bloom five centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. Never before or since has an outpouring of cultural development on such a grand and far-reaching scale been realized on earth. It was, however, just as Charles Dickens said of Revolutionary France, the best of times and also the worst.

On the eve of its golden age, Greece was in peril. Xerxes, king of kings and ruler of the Persian Empire, which stretched from the Indus River to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and from the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean, had turned his attention toward the Europeans who dared to resist his will.

Persia was, in the truest sense, the greatest superpower of its day. Cyrus the Great launched the era of Persian expansion in the 6th century BC, and his successors held dominion of much of the known world for nearly three centuries. With Persia at the height of its glory, Xerxes ruled peoples of great diversity. Phoenicians, Egyptians, Medes, Cypriotes, Syrians, Levantines and Ethiopians were his subjects, as were those Greeks who had ventured forth from their mainland and established cities on the islands of the Aegean Sea, along the coasts of the Black Sea and Asia Minor.

The Greek city-states, foremost of which were Sparta and Athens, maintained curious relationships with one another. Strained those these relations were from time to time, the Greeks recognized their ancestral ties, and that mutual defense was their best and only hope against outside aggression from such an overwhelming force as Xerxes could place in the field and on the sea. At the time of the Persian threat, that tenuous alliance was all that stood against Persia’s domination of Greece and thereby all of Europe.

To place the situation in perspective, consider that during an average lifetime a citizen of Athens might have known Socrates, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Themistocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. The heirs of western culture in philosophy, medicine, mathematics, drama and democracy owe their existence to such men. Therefore, the names of Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis are remembered with reverence.

Ten years separated Marathon, where the first Persian invasion force was decisively defeated, from Thermopylae, where the sacrifice of a relative few made ultimate victory possible, and Salamis, the greatest sea fight the world had yet known.It was those battles, fought more than two millennia ago, that preserved a way of life and shaped the future of mankind.

In 500 BC the Ionian Greeks, who had settled in the western coast of Asia Minor, rose up against Persia’s King Darius I. In support of their Greek brethren the Athenians, along with a contingent from Eretria, raided and burned the Persian city of Sardis.

After six years of fighting, the Ionian insurrection was finally put down. Darius vowed to punish the upstart Athenians for their transgression into what he regarded as a domestic affair. Persian forces on land and sea advanced toward Greece in 491 BC, but the fleet was mauled in a storm off Mount Athos and the expedition was called off.

The next year, 490 BC, the Persians once again sallied forth to punish Athens. This force, commanded by Datis and Artaphernes, captured the island of Euboea and used it as a staging area for the invasion of the Greek mainland. In full view of the Athenians and their allies, the Plataeans, the Persians landed on the plain of Marathon and proceeded to divide their forces a few days later. Datis and Artaphernes intended to fight the Greeks at Marathon with 20,000 men while the city of Athens, only lightly defended, would fall easy prey to the second Persian army.

The fact that the Athenians chose to meet their enemy at the point of its entry into their country rather than defending the gates of their city is in itself remarkable. First, the Athenians and Plataeans were overwhelmingly outnumbered, mustering only 11,000 citizen soldiers. Second, the famed historian Herodotus states, the Greeks had never even been able to hold their own in battle against the Persians before. Third, throughout the rebellion in Ionia and the Persian advance toward Athens, the Greeks had repeatedly chosen to defend their cities rather than risk battle in the open. Finally, the Greek penchant for innovation provably had not been extended tot eh battlefield, especially against a numerically superior and battle-hardened foe.

In their hour of crisis the Athenians appealed to their Spartan rivals for military aid, since it should have been obvious that if the Persians were victorious at Marathon all Greece would soon fall before them. Miltiades, the senior Athenian commander, dispatched his swiftest runner, Pheidippides, to Sparta 150 miles away. ‘Men of Sparta,’ read the plea, ‘the Athenians ask you to help them and not stand by while the most ancient city of Greece is crushed and enslaved by a foreign invader. Already Eretria is destroyed and her people in chains, and Greece is weaker by the loss of one fine city.’

Herodotus reports that the Spartans were sympathetic but, because of a religious observance, could not march until the moon was full. At the same time, Hippias-the son of Pisistratus, who had been deposed when Athens adopted democracy-guided the Persians to the plain of Marathon, a scant 25 miles from Athens.

The strategy upon which Miltiades and the Greek commanders settled at Marathon was to close rapidly with the enemy, nullifying the effectiveness of the Persian archers, who on so many occasions had decimated their opponent’s ranks under a torrent of arrows. Once at close quarters, the heavily armed Athenian infantrymen would be on a more than equal footing with their Persian counterparts. Darius’ generals had made good use of cavalry in other engagements, but their numbers were probably quite limited at Marathon because of the logistical difficulty in transporting large numbers of horses by sea.

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