“You know, the first marathon runner died at the finish line.” So a chuckling brother-in-law told me when I mentioned my big goal. Very funny, my brother. But it is true for us all, in a way: we will all die at the end of the race. At my age, I suspect it will happen at some point in the next thirty or forty years. For the first marathoner, though, it was reportedly more immediate. His name, according to Lucian, a Greek writer who told the story in passing, was Philippides, although some prefer to translate the name from an earlier, less fatal history by Herodotus, related 500 years closer to the event. Herodotus wrote of a day-runner named Pheidippides who did not immediately die when the race was done.
In his own time, Pheidippides would inspire an annual torch race ceremony, but he was primarily a forerunner to the events at Marathon, a field of battle twenty-some miles outside of Athens from which Lucian’s Philippides was later said to have ventured after, and not before, the battle was won. Pheidippides undertook a longer journey before the battle, and he ran peripherally, from Athens to Sparta and back. In time Heracleides and others, including Plutarch and later Lucian, started revising the details and making the runner a legend, as if the original day-runner story weren’t already remarkable.
I like the Lucian tale, and I will retell his version, but let it first be noted: Herodotus was called the Father of History, and it is his account, told thirty or forty years after the event, that is about as accurate as we can expect. Yes, Pheidippides was a long-distance runner, and yes, he inspired a festival run, but it wasn’t to or from Marathon, it wasn’t the 26.2 miles we are now familiar with and he didn’t declare victory and collapse at the finish line. In fact, if we accept the first report, the span he covered between Athens and Sparta was an incredible distance of six marathon races, and he ran it twice. And yet not so incredible: there is an obscure but real race run today that is directly attributed to that journey: the Spartathlon, 153 miles long, and despite how super-human that may sound, people actually run it and have even fit it into a very long day, with the best time under 21 hours. True! And history-based. But then, eventually, came a satirist named Lucian, who wrote, among other things, his own “True History” (really!), a more accessible set of essays for the masses. Here then, in the spirit of Lucian, is my own retelling of the tale:
And so it was from the fields of Fennel, or what the Greeks call “Marathon” (chew on that!), that a professional dispatch runner was called upon to deliver fresh news from the battlefront. “Go to Athens, twenty six miles around the corner, and tell them what has happened here,” the soldiers said. The man, named Philippides, lover of horses, set off immediately. It was in the heat of September and the way across Attica was hilly and indirect, and all the horses he cared for were tired from the battle and never good for more than a six mile run anyway, so Philippides (or Pheidippides if you prefer) made his way on foot. When at last he arrived in Athens, he ran straight to the authorities and, with his breath nearly spent, declared, “Victory! Nike! Rejoice, for we have won the battle!” And then, his mission complete, he collapsed and died. And to this day, very few people talk about the three hundred miles he once ran from Athens to Sparta and back, or how he was one of many on the battlefields of Fennel. No, they talk about that three or four hour summer run he ran, and how he put all that he had into it, and how in the end he raised his hands up and called it as he saw it, a win for the team and an accomplishment beyond the run itself. And yes, in the end, he died, as we all will one day, but not until after our final race is run.
Did this really happen? Of course it did! This was not another legend of the gods, like so many other Greek stories; this was a reflection of mortality, yet also of will and purpose and endurance and all that makes us human. And this is how we remember the run of Philippides, or Pheidippides if you will, but even in the name it is less about the runner than it is about the run, more about the dramatic race than the original dispatch. It was a run that followed a battle with news to report and victory to declare, but even the name that once belonged to the battle and the news and the victory now describes, above all else, the runner’s achievement: Marathon!
Footnote to history: Sometimes truth is what we make it, but let me try to get it right. Lucian (125-180 AD) did write A True History, an extensive work that did not include his account of the runner Philippides. That mention was limited to a few brief sentences in A Slip of the Tongue in Salutation, a short side essay about the cultural habit of greeting people with a careless wish for joy. And I have let Lucian inspire me to retell his tale, but with a careless regard for truth, so, more carefully now: The Battle of Marathon occurred in 490 BC (or BCE, if you will). Herodotus chronicled the event in Histories, ca. 440 BCE, and his account refers to a day-runner named Pheidippides, or in some later redrafts Philippides, but with no mention of a post-battle run or the declaration “Nenikekamos” (Joy, we won!). More than five hundred years later, Mestius Plutarchus of Chaermea, citing a lost work by Heracleides of Pontus (390-310 BCE), related the joy account in “On the Glory of Athens” in Volume IV of his Moral Essays (ca 100 AD (or CE if you’d rather)). Heracleides called the runner Thersippus, wrote Plutarch, but “most historians declare that it was Eucles who ran in full armor, hot from the battle, and bursting in at the doors of the first men of the State, could only say “Hail! We are victorious!’ and straightaway expired. (From Plutarch, Moralia, tr. Cherniss/Humbold, Loeb Library 1911). Those other works Plutarch referred to have never been found, and thus his account of a Marathon to Athens run is the earliest mention we have, 590 years after it was supposed to have occurred. Sometimes history is how we take it.
Bringing news of Marathon, he found the archons seated, in suspense regarding the issue of the battle. ‘Joy, we win!’ he said, and died upon his message, breathing his last word Joy.”
— from A Slip of the Tongue in Salutation,
by Lucian (ca 180 AD; tr. Fowler, 1905).
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