Tom Holland

You know, you are a hoplite.

Your head is now encased in metal.

You are effectively cut off.

from all the sounds around you.

The trumpets are braying to signal the start of the advance, but you can barely hear it through the bronze of your helmet.

But what you do have is the kind of this great collective jolting of the Athenian line as your fellows onto your left and to your right start the descent.

And so you have no choice, even...

If you're a coward, you still have to advance.

I think everyone on that morning must have felt terror.

But I think that people in that advance are kind of born on the intoxication as well as the dread of the moment.

And, you know, we know that when Greeks advance into battle, there are those who wet themselves.

There are those who void their bowels and streak their cloaks.

But you advance because you feel yourself to be part of a collective.

You are kind of one with your fellow citizens.

And I think that Herodotus, we read it in the previous episode, that sense that being part of a democracy probably...

does give a sense of fellowship to an Athenian phalanx that perhaps hadn't previously existed.

So as you descend down that slope onto the plane of Marathon, I think you probably do feel that you are part of a body of freeborn men.

I think that it would not be wrong to say that that is part of what steals the Athenians to take this incredible risk of marching down to meet an enemy who has never been defeated by a Greek army before.

And they have a mile to cover.

And incredible stories in due course come to be told of this advance.