Battle of Marathon
B.C. 490
"Quibus actus uterque Europae atque Asiae fatis concurrerit orbis".
A very rough translation of which is:
"To which driven, the skin of Europe and Asias will have run together,
to the utterances of the
circle."
The Battle of Marathon 1
Marathon
There were eleven members of that council of war. Ten were the Athenian generals who were then annually elected at Athens, one for each of the local tribes into which the
Athenians were divided. Each general led the men of his own tribe, and each was invested with equal military
authority.
But one of the archons was also associated with them in the
general command of the army. This magistrate was termed the polemarch or "war ruler"; he had the privilege of leading the right wing of the
army in battle, and his vote in a council of war was equal to that of any of the generals. A noble Athenian named Callimachus was the War
ruler of this year and as such, stood listening to the earnest discussion of the ten generals. They had, indeed, deep matter for anxiety,
though little aware how momentous to mankind were the votes they were about to give, or how the generations to come would read with interest
the record of their discussions.
They saw before them the invading forces of a mighty empire,
which had in the last fifty years shattered and enslaved nearly all the kingdoms and principalities of the then known world. They knew war
and battle and that all the resources of their own country were comprised in the little army entrusted to their
guidance.
They saw before them a chosen host of the great King, sent to
wreak his special wrath on that country and on the other insolent little Greek community, which had dared to aid his rebels and burn the
capital of one of his provinces. That victorious host had already fulfilled half its mission of vengeance. Eretria, the confederate of Athens
in the bold march against Sardis nine years before, had fallen in the last few days and the Athenian generals could discern from the heights
the island of Aegilia, in which the Persians had deposited their Eretrian prisoners whom they had reserved to be led away captives into Upper
Asia, there to hear their doom from the lips of King Darius himself.
Moreover, the men of Athens knew that in the
campgrounds before them was their own banished tyrant, who was seeking to
be reinstated by foreign cimeters in despotic sway over any remnant of his countrymen that might survive the sack of their town, and might
be left behind as too worthless for leading away into Median bondage.
The numerical disparity between the force, which, the Athenian commanders had under them, and that which they were called
on to encounter, was hopelessly apparent to some of the council. The historians who wrote nearest to the time of the war and battle do not
pretend to give any detailed statements of the numbers engaged, but there are sufficient data for our making a general estimate.
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