Tom Holland

And the Persians have the advantage, of course, that on their wings, the men who have broken there have a head start.

And so they are able to start piling into the ships before the Athenians arrive.

But once the Athenians get to the beach where all the Persian ships are drawn up, there is very, very desperate fighting.

dies.

So Callimachus.

Yeah, so it's on the beaches that the Athenian casualties are heaviest.

So we say Callimachus dies there, the war archon, another of the ten generals, he dies there.

And there's a very famous story, the one Athenian reaches up to the prow of a ship that is pulling away to try and stop it.

And there's a person with an axe who swings it down, chops off the Athenian's hand who collapses into the sea, blood spraying everywhere.

And this Athenian is the brother of Aeschylus, who is the first of the three great Athenian tragedians of the 5th century BC.

And Aeschylus himself is also fighting at Marathon.

And he has this famous epitaph.

So when he dies, he doesn't mention any of his tragedies.

He just said,

You know, I was at Marathon.

I fought against the long-haired Mede.

That was the one thing that he was proud of.

So the Athenians do manage to capture some of the Persian ships to kind of burn them, but the mass of the fleet does manage to pull away.

And so this is a problem for the Athenians because the question now is, well, where is it going to be heading?

You know, Athens effectively stands defenseless.