The Battle of Marathon

The event

Determined to punish Athens for its role in the Ionian Revolt, Darius I sent a Persian expeditionary force across the Aegean in 490 BC. On the plain of Marathon, a heavily outnumbered force of Athenian hoplites — with only modest reinforcement from the small city of Plataea — routed the Persian army in one of history's most celebrated upsets. Tradition holds that a runner named Pheidippides raced roughly twenty-six miles back to Athens to announce the victory before collapsing, the origin of the modern marathon race.

The victory at Marathon bought Athens and the fledgling Greek city-states another generation of independence, time in which their distinctive culture — philosophy, drama, and civic life — could mature. That same Greek culture, and the koine Greek language it eventually spread across the known world, would become, in God's providence, the common tongue in which the New Testament was written and the gospel first carried 'to the end of the earth' (Acts 1:8).