Marathon

but the Athenians in the city, who while Pisistratus was collecting money and afterwards when he had taken Marathon took no notice of it, did now, and when they learned that he was marching from Marathon against Athens, they set out to attack him.

The first place in Attica which they took and held was Marathon:

When the Athenians learned this, they too marched out to Marathon, with ten generals leading them.

Perceiving this, Miltiades, the general of the Athenians, who conquered the Persians in the battle at Marathon, imitated this manner:

Yes, and when Thucydides had said, "to have alone faced the danger at Marathon," Demosthenes said, "By those who faced the danger at Marathon.

For we say that at Marathon we alone stood in the van of danger against the barbarian;

from which also he set out twenty years after, when now an old man, and accompanied the Median forces to Marathon.

I urged that we should emulate the battle that we fought at Plataea, the struggles off the shores of Salamis, the battles of Marathon and Artemisium, and the generalship of Tolmides, who with a thousand picked men of the Athenians fearlessly marched straight through the Peloponnesus, the enemy’s country.

After passing this decree, and exchanging solemn pledges and oaths, they fearlessly took up their stand as the protectors of the whole of Greece, and met the Persians at Marathon;

you also, who snap up the sharp-stinging gnats in the marshy vales, and you who dwell in the fine plain of Marathon, all damp with dew, and you, the francolin with speckled wings;

Yet certainly these are those principles by which my system of education nurtured the men who fought at Marathon.

This is just what happened when we heard that Philip was in the Hellespont and again when the pirate triremes put in at Marathon.

Your past experience will not be repeated, when he threw a force into Lemnos and Imbros and carried your citizens away captive, when he seized the shipping at Geraestus and levied untold sums, or, to crown all, when he landed at Marathon and bore away from our land the sacred trireme, while you are still powerless to prevent these insults or to send your expeditions at the appointed times.

I swear it by our forefathers who bore the brunt of warfare at Marathon, who stood in array of battle at Plataea, who fought in the sea-fights of Salamis and Artemisium, and by all the brave men who repose in our public sepulchres, buried there by a country that accounted them all to be alike worthy of the same honor —all, I say, Aeschines, not the successful and the victorious alone.

But he will hear that our resources consist of the ratable value of our country, and how we can fight in defence of it against invaders from his land, those ancestors of his who fought at Marathon best know;

The Plataeans, men of Athens, alone among the Greeks came to your aid at Marathon when Datis, the general of King Dareius, on his return from Eretria after subjugating Euboea, landed on our coast with a large force and proceeded to ravage the country.

Not one corner left us in the whole of Hellas, we are come to Marathon and its neighbouring land, and here we sit as suppliants at the altars of the gods, and pray their aid;

—Before the altar of Zeus at Marathon.

Then Athena left Scheria and went away over the sea.

but if they mean those who at Marathon conquered the barbarians, then they are of all men the most brazen, if, that is to say, they praise those who governed Athens at that time and in the same breath would persuade us to act in a manner contrary to theirs and to commit blunders so gross that I am at a loss what I should do—whether I should speak the truth as on all other occasions or be silent ou …

Later than Eurystheus, the troops dispatched by Dareius to ravage Hellas landed at Marathon, fell upon more misfortunes and greater disasters than they had hoped to inflict upon our city, and fled in rout from all Hellas.