After their festival and the arrival of the full moon, the Spartans sent a force of two thousand men to help the Athenians, but they arrived too late. They offered their congratulations and gloomily toured the battlefield. It was a humbling experience.
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Marathon was a famous victory. More than that, it was an inspiration, for it proved that the new Athens could infuse its citizens with energy and that democracy was not the incompetent shambles its critics had predicted. The demos could make and stick to decisions, and win a war. What was more, the Great King’s fearsome army had feet of clay. It could be beaten. Free men had overcome the hordes of an oriental despot.
For Darius, by contrast, the defeat was of little or no strategic consequence. It was a pinprick to his prestige, his pride, and his empire, not a wound. However, the setback annoyed him, and he vowed that he would get his own back when occasion allowed.
The Greeks made the most of things. Statues and odes were commissioned. A column was erected to the fallen Callimachus. The few Hellenic dead were cremated and buried under a large, man-made mound, which can still be seen today. Every year a ceremony was held there to honor “those who died in the cause of liberty.” The thousands of dead Persians were treated with less respect. The Athenians claimed they had given them a proper burial, but there was no collective tomb. They were thrown hastily into a trench at the northern end of the plain of Marathon (where a German visitor in the nineteenth century reported finding a loose scatter of human bones on the ground).
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Just as the Olympian gods joined in the battles between Greeks and Trojans up and down the windy plain of Troy, so various immortals were credited with combating the barbarians on the glorious field of Marathon. These included Athena, the demigod Heracles, and the city’s artful founder Theseus. They and other divinities who had given assistance were honored in various ways: Athena was given a bronze statue on the Acropolis and a treasury was built at Delphi with the inscription: “To Apollo first fruits from the Medes from Marathon.”
A quarter of a century or so later, a fresco of the battle was painted in the Painted Stoa, a colonnade in the agora. It depicted a composite narrative, showing in a single image the different phases of the battle. Miltiades is given pride of place among the ten generals. The guidebook author Pausanias called by in the second century A.D. and has left a record of what he saw. The Plataeans and Athenians
are coming to grips with the barbarians: things are about equal. But in the thick of the battle the Persians are fleeing. They are pushing each other into the marsh. The painting concludes with the Phoenician ships, and with Greeks butchering barbarians as they leap into them. The [eponymous] hero Marathon…is standing there, with Theseus rising out of the earth, and Athena and Heracles.
In the aftermath of victory the Athenians did not forget the epiphany of Pheidippides, for it was reported that the great god Pan had also been seen battling against the invaders. It was essential that he be rewarded and welcomed for the first time into Attica.
A cave near Marathon village was dedicated to his worship and that of the Nymphs, female spirits of the countryside and his amorous companions. The untiring Pausanias said that the place was worth visiting.
The entrance to this cave is narrow and, as you come in, you find “chambers” and “baths” and the so-called Pan’s “herd of goats”—rocks mostly resembling goats.
The cave has been rediscovered in modern times, with cavities holding water and stalactites that, with a touch of imagination, can be seen to resemble goats. Finds in the sanctuary include figurines of Pan and female forms, Attic red-figure pottery, and gold jewelry, which date from the fifth century and onwards into Roman times.
Pan was also given a home in a shallow cave on the northwest slope of the Acropolis where every year he was propitiated with sacrifices and a torch race. Other caves sacred to him have been found on various mountains in Attica, the most ornate being on Mount Hymettus. A certain Archedemos described himself as a nympholept, one seized by the nymphs in an ecstatic and erotic frenzy, and covered the walls of the cave with reliefs and dedicatory inscriptions.
Miltiades dedicated a statue of Pan on the battlefield for which Simonides wrote a brief verse.
I am goat-footed Pan from Arcadia. I was against the Persians
And for the Athenians. Miltiades erected me.
One can almost hear the god bleating with delight in the hills.
9
Fox as Hedgehog
The father took his teenaged son for a walk along the beach at Phaleron, the uncomfortably exposed harbor of Athens. He pointed to the rotten carcasses of decommissioned state triremes, pulled up on the sand and abandoned. He knew the boy was thinking of going into politics and wanted to warn him off. He said: “This is how the demos, the people, treat their leaders when they have no further use for them.”
The youth did not listen to this good advice. His name was Themistocles. Born in about 524, he was ambitious, but suffered from two serious disadvantages. He was half a foreigner, for his mother came from Thrace. Also his father, Neocles, although connected to a good family, was a “man of no particular mark.” The democracy was still new and the best jobs still often went to aristocrats and to men of authentic Athenian stock.
What Themistocles lacked in the way of birth, he more than made up in energy and intelligence. Plutarch, his biographer, reports that he was “impetuous, naturally quick-witted and drawn to a life of action and public affairs.”
He suffered from discrimination, for boys of mixed descent with a foreign mother were looked down on as illegitimate, or nothoi, although they were allowed Athenian citizenship. For their physical training, they were encouraged to enroll at the Cynosarges gymnasium outside the city walls. Heracles, to whom this down-market sanctuary was dedicated, was himself of mixed parentage, being the son of Zeus and a mortal mother. Refusing to accept social disadvantage, Themistocles persuaded some upper-class friends to join him in physical exercise there.
As a schoolboy what he really enjoyed was making mock speeches and learning the arts of the orator, essential for anyone who wished to make his way in the fresh, new, noisy democracy. He showed little or no interest in any subjects intended to be character-forming or where “pleasing accomplishments fit for a free man” were taught (tuning the lyre or playing the harp, singing, dancing, and the like). As a result, he failed to shine at fashionable dinner parties where guests were expected to be competent amateur musicians and play or sing after the meal. Men who thought they were better educated than he was sneered at Themistocles for his boorishness.
His early years in politics were not altogether successful, for he was somewhat too impulsive. In later life he justified himself by saying: “The wildest colts make the best horses, provided that they are properly broken in.”
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If Themistocles wanted an example of his father’s warning of the fate in store for Athenian politicians, one soon came to hand. This was the rise and almost immediate fall of the victor of Marathon, the great Miltiades.
As a grown man in his early thirties Themistocles fought at Marathon in 490. He was philoprogenitive, twice married and with ten children. He seems to have been a happy family man, for otherwise we can depend on his enemies having briefed the ancient sources.