The Persians continued to double Sunio, when the Athenians were already marching at full speed to the aid of the square, and having arrived before the barbarians, they barricaded themselves near the temple of Hercules in Cynosarges...
Those were some of the words that the great Herodotus of Halicarnassus left us about 2,500 years ago about the well-known end of the Battle of Marathon. Broadly speaking, let us remember that this battle is part of one of the many that took place between the Persian Empire and the Greek polis of Sparta (au, au, au ), Athens, Corinth, Miletus… during the three Medical Wars.
Battle of Marathon
There are many brushstrokes that this warlike encounter has left us in our collective ideology, although not all of them are historically confirmed. It was collected by our beloved Herodotus, as we discussed in the article "Post-traumatic stress 3000 years ago", the case of the soldier who, for no reason or reason, began to suffer blindness after the battle:
In that fight a strange prodigy happened:at the height of the action, Epicelo, an Athenian, son of Koupagoras, fighting like a good soldier, was suddenly blinded without having received either a blow from close range or a shot from a distance throughout his entire body; and from that point he was blind for the whole of his life.
Thanks to this mythical combat, we can today contemplate the Marathon Tumulus. It is a small hill that is estimated to be very close to the real battlefield where all the fallen Athenians (about 200) were cremated and buried with some of their weapons as a tribute to their bravery and courage. The 42 km distance of the tough marathon race is also not unknown to us. This athletic test presumably had its origin in the distance traveled by Pheidippides or Pheidipides from the battle to Athens. There, women, old men and children who had not fought, fearfully awaited any news, as they knew of the Persian threat to arrive by sea and loot and burn the city, rape their women and kill their children. Legend has it that the message arrived in time to proclaim victory and die of exhaustion afterward.
But… what if this was just a legend? What if the Athenians had not received any news of the outcome and were seeing the Persian fleet approaching Cape Sunium as Herodotus tells? What if they were willing to play one last card before, as has been said, killing their children themselves and then committing suicide?
The good historian of Halicarnassus wrote that the Athenian soldiers returned from the battle just in time to also defend the city of Athens and that because of that, or because of some scam with part of the Persian army that allowed themselves to be bought, they returned to Asia with their ships .
However, there are those who maintain that, seeing the proximity of the enemy, it was the women, elders and children themselves who positioned themselves with shields, armor and spears at a strategic point in the city. Thanks to this ruse, the Persians would assume that the army had returned or, worse still, that they had infantry reserves that had remained in the city. In any case, another defeat so quickly would not do them any good and that was how “the barbarians, passing with their army beyond the arsenal of the Athenians, then turned towards Asia. ”