Marathon 2,500 Years Edited by Christopher Carey & Michael Edwards
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MARATHON 2,500 YEARS EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER CAREY & MICHAEL EDWARDS INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL STUDIES SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON MARATHON – 2,500 YEARS BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL STUDIES SUPPLEMENT 124 DIRECTOR & GENERAL EDITOR: JOHN NORTH DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONS: RICHARD SIMPSON MARATHON – 2,500 YEARS PROCEEDINGS OF THE MARATHON CONFERENCE 2010 EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER CAREY & MICHAEL EDWARDS INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL STUDIES SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 2013 The cover image shows Persian warriors at Ishtar Gate, from before the fourth century BC. Pergamon Museum/Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin. Photo Mohammed Shamma (2003). Used under CC‐BY terms. All rights reserved. This PDF edition published in 2019 First published in print in 2013 This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. More information regarding CC licenses is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Available to download free at http://www.humanities-digital-library.org ISBN: 978-1-905670-81-9 (2019 PDF edition) DOI: 10.14296/1019.9781905670819 ISBN: 978-1-905670-52-9 (2013 paperback edition) ©2013 Institute of Classical Studies, University of London The right of contributors to be identified as the authors of the work published here has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Designed and typeset at the Institute of Classical Studies TABLE OF CONTENTS Introductory note 1 P. J. Rhodes The battle of Marathon and modern scholarship 3 Christopher Pelling Herodotus’ Marathon 23 Peter Krentz Marathon and the development of the exclusive hoplite phalanx 35 Andrej Petrovic The battle of Marathon in pre-Herodotean sources: on Marathon verse-inscriptions (IG I3 503/504; Seg Lvi 430) 45 V. L. Konstantinopoulos The Persian wars and political conflicts in Athens 63 Andreas Markantonatos The silence of Thucydides: the battle of Marathon and Athenian pride 69 K. W. Arafat Marathon in art 79 Ariadne Gartziou-Tatti Gods, heroes and the battle of Marathon 91 Antonis Mastrapas The battle of Marathon and the introduction of Pan’s worship to Athens: the political dimension of a legend through written evidence and archaeological finds 111 Christopher Carey Marathon and the construction of the comic past 123 Efi Papadodima The Battle of Marathon in fifth-century drama 143 Ioanna Karamanou As threatening as the Persians: Euripides in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae 155 Eleni Volonaki The Battle of Marathon in funeral speeches 165 Athanasios Efstathiou The historical example of Marathon as used in the speeches On the false embassy, On the crown, and Against Ctesiphon by Demosthenes and Aeschines 181 v vi MARATHON – 2,500 YEARS Christos Kremmydas Alexander the Great, Athens, and the rhetoric of the Persian wars 199 Georgia The Battle of Marathon as a topos of Athenian Xanthaki-Karamanou political prestige in Classical times 213 Christopher Tuplin Intolerable clothes and a terrifying name: the characteristics of an Achaemenid invasion force 223 Ewen Bowie Marathon in the Greek culture of the Second century AD 241 Michael Jung Marathon and the construction of the Persian wars in Antiquity and modern times. Part I: Antiquity 255 Peter Funke Marathon and the construction of the Persian wars in post-Antique times 267 Lorna Hardwick Moving targets, modern contests: Marathon and cultural memory 275 Index 289 MARATHON – 2,500 YEARS INTRODUCTORY NOTE The chapters in this volume were delivered at a colloquium marking the anniversary of Marathon which was held at the Faculty of Philology, University of Peloponnese, Kalamata 7-10 October 2010.1 The aim was to assemble a group of researchers to revisit the event from a variety of perspectives and also to celebrate what was on any reckoning a key moment not just in Greek but in European history. Marathon began the rapid upward trajectory which propelled Athens from a moderately important Greek polis to a regional power. It formed a seminal element in the sharpening of the Greek sense of ethnic distinctiveness (already underway) which is at the root of the East-West dichotomy and of Greek and subsequent perceptions of the East. And even for those who find historical counterfactuals unhelpful it is difficult to resist the conclusion that European history would have looked different if the Persians had won. The scale and movements of the expeditionary force argue a targeted punitive expedition; but history (including the Persian invasion of 480) shows that punitive expeditions can easily form the basis for conquest. Marathon is indelibly embedded in the collective European consciousness, to the point where John Stuart Mill (aptly quoted by Peter Rhodes, Peter Krentz, Peter Funke, and Lorna Hardwick in this volume) could observe that ‘the Battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings’. It is, with Salamis, part of the stuff of legend. And so it was for the Greeks. This larger-than-life dimension had established itself long before our first encounter with it. The supernatural motifs and superhuman achievements (like the famous advance at a run) which we find in our earliest account of the battle two generations later in Herodotus, had already become part of the story by the mid-fifth century at the latest, possibly even from the very first. This was perhaps inevitable even without the spin which the Athenians gave the event. The dramatic disproportion in the powers in play and the matching disparity in the casualties of the two sides made for a peripeteia with a profound appeal to Greek ways of looking at the world. This, together with the issues in play, gave the battle a lasting impact on material culture, art, and literature from the Painted Stoa in the Agora at Athens in the middle of the fifth century through to the visual arts and poetry of the modern era. The speakers at the Kalamata conference were invited to examine the battle from divergent but complementary angles, (military-)historical, literary, religious, including receptions ancient and modern. The conference offered, and this book offers, not a coherent narrative but a series of drills, each designed to make sense of an aspect of the battle from the standpoint of a specific discipline or within a different context, textual, material, or 1 Technically we were a year early; 2011 was the actual 2,500th anniversary (there was no year zero); 2010 still somehow feels right, even if it reflects symbolic rather than mathematical numeracy. 1 2 MARATHON – 2,500 YEARS societal. It is not the story, nor even a story, of Marathon. And it certainly is not the last word. For the opportunity we are grateful to the Faculty of Philology of the University of Peloponnese at Kalamata for its hospitality and especially to the Chair of the Faculty, Professor Georgia Xanthaki-Karamanou, and Dr Eleni Volonaki. Chris Carey Mike Edwards MARATHON: 2,500 YEARS COMMITTEES Honorary Committee Bishop of Messinia Mr. Chrysostome Members of the Academy of Athens: Prof. M. Sakellariou, Prof. S. Iakovidis, Prof. Ev. Moutsopoulos, Dr. V. Petrakos Organizing Committee Chair: Prof. G. Xanthaki-Karamanou Vice-Chair: Assoc. Prof. V. Konstantinopoulos Secretary: Ass. Prof. E. Volonaki Treasurer: Ass. Prof. I. Spiliopoulou Scientific Committee Prof. G. Xanthaki-Karamanou, Chair of Faculty of Philology, University of Peloponnese Prof. A. Savvides, Chair of Faculty of History, Archaeology and Cultural Management, University of Peloponnese Prof. C. Carey, Professor of Greek, Department of Greek and Latin, UCL Prof. P. Rhodes, Emeritus Professor University of Durham THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 1 AND MODERN SCHOLARSHIP P. J. RHODES So much has been written about the battle of Marathon, from so wide a range of viewpoints, that I was probably not the only contributor to this volume to have thought despairingly that it would be difficult to say anything worthwhile about Marathon which has not been said already by somebody somewhere. In the end that provided me with the subject for my paper, and I should like to look at the wide range of scholarly investigations which has been prompted by the battle of Marathon. Marathon has inevitably attracted military historians, interested in how the Athenians succeeded in defeating the Persians and what the consequences of their success were. It is worth mentioning one unusual publication, a paper by N. Whatley which was written for a meeting in Oxford in 1920 but not published until 1964, which took Marathon as a test case for asking more generally how, and how far, we can reconstruct what happened in ancient battles, and criticizing some over-confident reconstructions which were prevalent in the early twentieth century.2 J. F. Lazenby in a fairly recent book on the Persian Wars has doubted the attribution to the Athenians of clever strategy and tactics, better discipline than the Persians or even the effect of belonging to a free state fighting for its freedom, and prefers to think of a victory won by ‘militiamen through sheer guts and chance’.3 The 2,500th anniversary has already prompted two new books, and there may be more on the way: R. A. Billows, Marathon: how one battle changed western civilization,4 and P. Krentz (one of the other contributors to this volume), The battle of Marathon,5 each of them considering both the campaign of 490 and the battle of Marathon and also the wider context. Billows has a new interpretation of the generals’ disagreement, and Krentz puts forward new suggestions as to why, where, and how the actual battle began, which I shall mention below. Beyond that, I begin with the written sources: overwhelmingly Herodotus, some tantalizing passages in later texts, some intriguing inscriptions. A. W. Gomme notoriously 1 My thanks to the organizers of the Marathon conference for inviting me to participate, to those who heard this paper and discussed Marathon with me, and to those who were able to point me to the article cited in n.