Marathon
MA-ruh-thon
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe battle of 490, ten years before Thermopylae. The Athenians met a Persian landing on the plain northeast of the city and beat it.
Herodotus says they were the first Greeks to charge the Persians at a run, and the first who could bear to look at Persian dress without terror, the sight of it having been enough until then.
The Spartans came, but late. They were kept at home by a festival and arrived after the fighting, went to look at the dead, praised the Athenians and went home. The pattern repeats at Thermopylae with a different festival.
Sources
- Hdt. 6.102-117
- Hdt. 6.120
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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