An Analysis of Herodotus in "The Persian Wars": 4. The Battle of Marathon

The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies ^ | 1960 | Professor Livio Catullo Stecchini

[SunkenCiv]

The Persian plans were intelligently and carefully conceived, as they usually were, but they were foiled by the genius of Miltiades who followed the military maxim pour les vaincre il faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace. The Persians knew that after the withdrawal of the cavalry they were exposed to an Athenian attack, but they must have calculated that if this attack was launched they could embark their infantry and sail off before the Athenians reached the shore. At a normal pace it would take about 15 or 20 minutes for the Athenian hoplite formation to advance the interval of more than a mile that separated the opposing forces. Since the Persians were aligned in front of their ships they could have embarked in this period of time. Even after they were compelled to enter into a fight and lost it, they succeeded in embarking most of their men with the Athenians hard upon them. On each side of a trireme there ran a gangplank placed on top of the outriggers of the oars, a gangplank on which the marines took their stations during naval combat; 50 men on each side could have easily been standing on this gangplank.

It was by the unorthodox maneuver of letting the hoplite formation run towards the enemy that Miltiades foiled the Persians... Those who follow Delbrueck imply that the Greeks, far from being athletes of the body and of the mind, were soft not only in their brains, but also in their muscles.

[mrsmith]

“we know this for a fact; the Persians lost.”

Love Herodotus precisely because he tells what people thought, instead of “the truth”.