Tom Holland

And it's telling that in the wake of Marathon, the Athenians start applying a new word to the Persians that they hadn't previously used.

And this is barbaroi or barbarians.

And literally, it means kind of the speakers of gibberish, people who don't speak gibberish.

Greek, and it conveys a sense of these gibberish speakers as kind of numberless, alien, jabbering, a reflection of what the Athenians had seen on the heights above Marathon when they looked down at the plain and gazed at the Asiatic hordes.

And it's not just the Athenians who have had their confidence boosted.

I think the whole of Greece has learned an invaluable lesson, which is that the Persians aren't invincible, that the barbarians can be defeated, that the Colossus has feet of clay.

You know, you defeat a superpower and inevitably it's going to convince you that even if the superpower comes back at you again, you might be able to see them off.

And this, of course, is what duly happens, because on one level, plainly, the Battle of Marathon isn't decisive at all, because 10 years later, in 480 BC, the Persians are back, and this time with a vastly greater force and led in person by their king, the son of Darius Xerxes.

And this time the Athenians do not meet the Persians with their infantry.

They meet them with a fleet at the battle of Salamis.

And they're commanded at Salamis by Themistocles, the young general who had been in command of his tribe at the center of the weakened Athenian battle line at Marathon.

And you could say that Salamis, because it's a great victory for Athens and for the Greeks, and it effectively destroys the hopes of the Persians of conquering Greece, that that's more decisive than Marathon.

But I think Marathon does deserve to be seen as decisive, and for two reasons.

I think that

Had Athens been defeated, destroyed, burned, the Persians would have been back.

And I think the Spartans might have resisted, but I don't think anyone else would have done.

So I think that the victory at Marathon gives not just Athens, but all the cities of Greece that decide to resist the Persian invasion.

It gives them the backbone to do that.

And I do also think that had Athens been annihilated, as Miletus had been annihilated, as Eretria had been annihilated,

then that would have had profound consequences for the future.