Tom Holland

And it's by now 10 o'clock in the morning.

The Athenians are obviously exhausted.

They're sweat soaked.

They're

wounded, covered in blood, but all of them are thinking about their families and homes back in Athens.

And so they decide we are going to have to march as fast as we can from Marathon and get back to Athens.

And there is, of course, a famous story that I'm sure most people will have heard that they send Pheidippides, the runner ahead of them, to run the 26 miles back to Athens.

And he gets there in record time and he proclaims, rejoice, we have won.

And then he dies with the exhaustion and intoxication of the moment.

Is this story true?

It's not in Herodotus.

It's in much later Greek sources.

But of course, this is what inspires the famous marathon race in the 1896 Olympics.

So it might not be true.

Might not be true.

I mean, I like to think it is.

All these stories, I prefer to think that they are.

And it means that the Battle of Marathon is the only battle to have an Olympic event.

But what we know for sure from Herodotus, whether Pheidippides has gone ahead of them or not, is that the Athenian army, I mean, to quote Herodotus, they raced back to the defence of their city as fast as their legs could carry them.

And astonishingly, they arrived there by late afternoon.