The Meaning of the Battle of Marathon
The account of the Athenians engaging the Persians at the battle of Marathon is one of the most moving passages in the Histories of Herodotus: “After the troops were in position and the sacrifices had proven favorable, when the Athenians were let loose and allowed to advance, they charged at a run toward the barbarians. The space between the two armies was about a mile, and the Persians, who saw the Athenians advancing toward them on the double, prepared to meet their attack; they assumed that the Athenians were seized by some utterly self-destructive madness, as they observed how few the Athenians were in number and how they were charging toward them with neither cavalry nor archers in support. So the barbarians suspected that the Athenians had gone mad, but when the Athenians closed with them in combat, they fought remarkably well. For they were the first of all the Hellenes we know of to use the running charge against their enemies, as well as the first to endure the sight of the Medes’ clothing and the men wearing it. In fact, until then, even to hear the name ‘Medes’ spoken would strike terror into Hellenes.”
What I suspect will be most obvious to my readers is the physical and military accomplishment of the Athenians, narrowly understood. The Athenians had to have the strength and stamina to run a mile in full battle armor, and, after crashing into the Persians, they had to have the military skill to quickly form ranks so as to be able to fight as a unit. To hear the commands of their leaders, they had to be silent. Their courage had to be sober-minded and not generated on the basis of shouting. (In the Iliad, Homer tells us that the barbarian Trojans would shout to pump themselves up and fought as individuals, while the Greeks fought in silence as units to hear the commands of their leaders.) Then, of course, they had to have the strength and stamina to fight the battle. After winning the battle, they had to have the strength and stamina to force-march back to Athens to prevent the Persian navy from landing further troops. These achievements would only be possible within the context of a militarized political order. Without extensive strength and stamina training, without extensive training in military combat, the Athenians simply would have been overrun by the Persians, as had happened to every group of people the Persians had faced until that moment.
This is not a “trad” achievement. The Spartans just so happened to miss the battle: they were “inconveniently” delayed by a religious festival. By contrast, Herodotus goes out of his way to observe that the Athenians were the first to use the running charge against their enemies. They used an innovative military tactic during the decisive battle to defeat the Persians rather than relying solely on traditional military tactics. Again, the Athenian innovators rather than the traditional Spartans were the ones to defeat the Persians.
Herodotus spends very little time discussing the Athenian strategy of the battle: they formed ranks, charged, fought together as a unit, and killed the Persians. Instead, Herodotus emphasizes the qualities of heart and soul necessary for the Athenians to do what they did. Why would these backwards yokel farmers think that they could take on the world’s greatest army, an army that had steam-rolled everyone they had faced until that moment? The Persian belief that Athenians must have been suicidally insane is reasonable. Regardless of whether the Athenians had the courage to face the Persians or to fight to the death to defend their way of life, why would the Athenians think that it was even possible to beat the Persians in an open battle, while being horribly outnumbered and without cavalry or archers? What gave them the ability to see the Medes as men who could be killed when the very name ‘Medes’ would strike terror into the heart of a Hellene? “After the full moon, 2000 Lacedaemonians marched to Athens in such great haste that they arrived in Attica on the third day out of Sparta. They were too late to engage in battle, but nevertheless wished to see the Medes, which they did when they reached Marathon. Then they praised the Athenians for their achievement and went home.” Note the order here: the Spartans had to see the dead Persians for themselves before they praised the Athenians. The Spartans had to see for themselves before they could take in what had happened and only then were they able to praise the Athenians. The battle of Marathon is an Athenian cultural achievement. How is this possible?
To answer this question, first we have to see what made the Persians the powerhouse that they were, that is, to understand the Persian cultural achievement, and to do that, we have to compare the Persians to the rest of the world. Now, the default position is parochialism. The default position is to hold one’s own group as fundamentally distinct from that of every other. As an aside, the word for “foreigner” in many American Indian tribes is indistinguishable from the word “enemy.” Let’s look at the Egyptians for a moment, a relatively high culture. Herodotus ends his account of the Egyptians by observing that when Amasis took a foreign wife, he was unable to have intercourse with her. If the parochial view were truly warranted, then each group would be a different species, and possibilities for human breeding as such would be non-existent. After Amasis threatens the life of his wife, she prays to Aphrodite, and they are able to breed. If the parochial understanding were truly warranted, it would take a miracle for someone of one stock or culture to breed with someone of a different stock or culture.
The Persian achievement—and the source of their success—then, is humanism. The Persian religion is astrological. It is the same sun, moon, and stars for every human, for every group of humans. Just as the cosmological bodies are the same for all, so a human is a human. This recognition, which seems so obvious to us today, is what allowed the Persians to form the greatest military organization known to man up to that point in time. It allowed them to incorporate members of different races into their empire and to employ them fruitfully on the battlefield; however, it is also the source of their political and military weakness. The political result of treating each human as “just a human” is slavishness and political tyranny. When taking a census, they simply counted the number of people within their empire. Everyone is equal—as a slave under the tyrant. The general method of Persian fighting is the swarming mass attack. The Persians do not distinguish on the basis of race and barely on the basis of capacity (I say “barely” to acknowledge the fact that they do have an elite unit, the “Immortals”). It would be an exaggeration to say that they don’t distinguish on the basis of specialty—after all, they do employ horsemen and archers—but the force of their military genius is to clump human beings together as indistinguishable atoms and to tell them to move forward—or to whip them forward. Under these circumstances, the enemy is simply overwhelmed. 10,000 atoms are greater than 1000 atoms. This sounds so simple and obvious, but it is a remarkable achievement. It is also why the Persians thought that the Greeks were insane to face them and suicidal to charge them.
The Egyptians stand for the apartness of stock and culture; the Persians stand for universalism and shared humanity. Both beliefs are wrong and lead to deeply unsavory political conditions. The Greek achievement is the synthesis of apartness and togetherness. If each stock or culture were its own species, then there would be no reason to have any opinion other than that the Persians were of a superior species. If each man were just a human being regardless of stock or culture, then there would be no reason for the Greeks to think, horribly outnumbered as they were, that they stood a chance. Herodotus emphasizes the cultural achievements of the Athenians at the battle of Marathon, because these achievements ground the physical achievements and are the necessary prerequisites for the heart and soul needed to face and defeat the Persian monstrosity. The Athenians had to “endure the sight of the Medes’ clothing and the men wearing it.” They had to recognize the human in the Mede and think “I can kill this person.” But recognizing the human in the Mede, they also had to think “We can kill these people, outnumbered as we are.” They had to see their shared humanity with the Persians to think that they could kill them; they had to see their physical and cultural superiority to think that they could kill them despite the numbers. This is why the Spartans had to look at the Persian corpses before they could honor the Athenians. The Athenian achievement at Marathon is—racist!