Tom Holland

It's said that the Athenians ran the whole way down towards the Persian lines.

I mean, this is impossible.

The weight of their kit is so heavy that they couldn't possibly have managed that and then fought a battle.

But I think it's clear that as they near the enemy, they do start to run.

And Herodotus is very, very precise about this.

They were, he writes, so far as we can tell,

the very first Greeks anywhere to make use of running towards an enemy as a tactic, and the first not to cringe before the sight of Median dress, so Persian dress, and the men who wear it, hitherto Greeks had only had to hear the name of the Medes to be reduced to a state of terror.

And they reach the Persian lines and they crash into the Persian lines and the impact is absolutely devastating.

It's this great pulverizing smash up of metal into flesh and bone.

And the Persian forces are much more lightly armored than the Greeks.

You know, they have probably quilted jerkins at best.

And this means that when the Athenians smash into them and they're using their spears, the spears don't shiver as they would if they were crashing into another phalanx.

And that means that the Persians can be skewered and those who aren't skewered can be trampled underfoot by the sheer weight of all these bronze-clad men.

And then, of course, Dominic, I think with your expression, you conveyed a certain sense of scepticism as to whether Pan

with his curling goat horns and his enormous phallus was going to turn up.

I was a little skeptical.

Well, he does turn up because the Persians are afflicted with a terrible sense of panic.

Right.

And on the wings, they turn and they flee and they start scarpering for the boats, which are drawn up at the far end of the plane on the beach.

And only in the centre does the Persian force have the better of the fight, because that's where the Athenian line has been weakened.