Yet the Athenian people, despite having voted in favor of Miltiades’ forward policy, still shrank from believing that they might have to stand and face the terrifying invaders on their own. Even as the army of the democracy, heading for Marathon, vanished from the sight of those left behind in Athens, one citizen was leaving in the opposite direction, south, into the Peloponnese. His name was Philippides, an athlete celebrated as his city’s greatest runner, and a man of prodigious stamina and speed. By covering the staggering distance of 140 miles in under two days, he found himself, on the second evening of his epic run, descending the rugged northern hills of Lacedaemon into the Eurotas valley. As the sun sank behind the peaks of Mount Taygetos, Philippides reached the unwalled cluster of barracks and temples that constituted Sparta.
The scenes he found there could not have been in sharper contrast to those he had left behind in Athens. The whole of Lacedaemon was en fête. Philippides had arrived while one of the Spartans’ holiest festivals, the Carneia, was in full swing, and all across the city young men were resting after a day spent playing brutal games of tag, while their elders feasted in field tents set up in deliberate imitation of a battlefield encampment. Far from signaling the Spartans’ readiness to leap up and march off to war, this parody of their conventional campaigning style in fact displayed the precise opposite: the Carneia was a time of peace. There could be no question, the Spartans informed Philippides regretfully, of breaking such a sacrosanct period of truce. Only once the moon climbed full in the silver-lit August sky would they be able to march to Marathon. On the evening of Philippides’ arrival in Sparta, that was still a week away. Add the marching time, and the Athenians could not expect to see a Spartan army for at least another ten days. Surely, had he still been alive, Cleomenes, that scoffer at taboos and inveterate enemy of Persia, would have insisted upon an immediate departure—but he was dead, and Sparta, in the wake of his violent end, was still in a state of shock. Of faction-fighting too. The bitterness between Leotychides and Demaratus, in particular, was continuing to poison public life, with the new king jeering at his predecessor as a commoner at every turn. With the Spartans embroiled in such turmoil, it would hardly do to anger the gods further—even though, as Philippides put it, “the Athenians beg you for your assistance, they beg you not to stand by idly while the most venerable city in the whole of Greece is crushed, they beg you not to let it be enslaved by gibberish-speaking invaders.”42
Yet even if ten days must have struck the disconsolate runner as a perilously long time for the Athenians to have to hold out, he was not destined to return from his mission entirely empty-handed.43 As he headed back to Athens, he was greeted by name on the heights beyond Tegea by a figure with the legs of a goat, two jutting horns and an enormous phallus. Perhaps it was a hallucination brought on by despair, exhaustion, or heatstroke—but Philippides himself had no doubt that he was being spoken to by a god. A potentially mischievous one as well—for Pan had a warped sense of humor, and was perfectly capable, if he bore a grudge against a city, of giving every citizen within its walls a raging erection. But on this occasion, appearing to Philippides, the god had only words of encouragement, reassuring the runner of his affection for the Athenians and promising to be of use to them very soon. Pan did not go into specifics; but since he was, as his name implied, the god of panic, whose very appearance on a battlefield could send a chill through one army and fire another with potent courage, his words must have struck Philippides as rich with hope and promise.
And all the more so when he finally arrived home and found not the smoldering pile of rubble that he might have feared but rather a city that was just about keeping its nerve. In fact, the news from the front appeared almost promising: the Athenian hoplites had marched with such speed to Marathon that they had been able to secure the two roads to Athens, then had promptly dug themselves in before the invaders could break out from the plain. On top of that, they had been joined in their camp by some eight hundred men from Plataea: every hoplite the tiny city had been able to dispatch. This was hardly a substantial reinforcement, but it was so bold a gesture of gratitude and so touching a demonstration of friendship that the Athenians had found themselves powerfully fortified by it. Perhaps, they now began to hope, as they listened to Philippides’ news, the standoff at Marathon might continue until the Spartan relief force arrived. Perhaps their city might be preserved from the Persian firestorm, after all.
Not that the mood of optimism, among a people stripped of their fighting men, could be reckoned wholly unclouded, of course. Fearful imaginings, fearful questions still swept through the nervous streets. What if the Persian fleet, making its way round the coast of Attica while the Athenian hoplites were being held at Marathon, suddenly landed at Phalerum? What if traitors were in touch with Hippias? What if they had plans to open the gates? The darkest whisperings of all inevitably had as their focus the Alcmaeonids. But nothing could be proved against them; nor, despite all the rumors, was there evidence of overt treachery or defeatism from anyone else. The city gates remained barred. Philippides, heading on to Marathon, could report to the generals there not only the news from Sparta and his encounter with Pan, but that morale back in Athens was holding firm.
Yet the runner, when he arrived at the Athenian camp and had his first view of what his fellow citizens there were facing, must surely have felt his own resolve begin to waver. The spectacle of the plain of Marathon was fit to chill the blood; as terrifying, perhaps, as the sight that had greeted defenders on the walls of Troy, for when since those ancient times had there been any invasion force to compare with that of Datis? At the far end of the bay, sheltered by a long promontory known to locals as the “Dog’s Tail,” the Persian ships had been hauled onto the sand, and they now extended along the curve of the beach for miles. The Asiatics themselves, monstrous numbers of them, dressed in their outlandish, brightly colored costumes and swarming over the plain, trampled beneath their alien feet crops sprung from the sweat of Athenian farmers and the holy Attic soil. Their horsemen, galloping up to the Athenian lines, wheeled and turned, wheeled and turned, mocking their adversaries’ lack of archers with fast-dispersing plumes of dust.
They did not yet dare to venture beyond the lines, however—for the Athenians, camped as they were on raised ground, with steeper ground rising sheer behind them, and a grove sacred to Heracles screening them from the approach of the Persian cavalry, occupied a formidable defensive position. Now, with the arrival of Philippides at their base, they could gauge precisely how much longer they would have to hold out until the Spartans arrived: a single week. Perfectly feasible, in the opinion of a majority of the Athenian generals. When others heard Philippides’ news, however, they knew that it brought a perilous moment of reckoning that much nearer. The Persians, as Miltiades in particular had good cause to appreciate, had a sinister mastery of the arts of espionage: there could be little doubt that Datis was already factoring the vagaries of Spartan timetabling into his own calculations; little doubt either that he would have realized that he was running out of time. Since the Athenian holding force had—so far—signally failed to disintegrate amid treachery and dissension, as Datis had evidently been expecting it to do, the Persian commanders would soon find themselves obliged to adopt a new strategy—and Miltiades, for one, appears to have had little doubt what it would prove to be. With the Athenians blocking the two roads south, there was only one way for Datis to strike at Athens before the Spartans arrived: by sea. If—when—the invaders began to embark, the Athenian army would be confronted with a hideous choice: stay put and risk seaborne enemy cavalry being welcomed into Athens by fifth columnists; or advance into the open plain and offer the Persians battle. Both were fearful prospects; but only the latter, Miltiades argued, offered even the faintest hope of victory.