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Studies of Travel - Greece
If Scheriê really be Corfu, this may seem a most unexpected route to Athens, and yet it is hardly more wonderful than the route by Syra by which the modern traveller often actually goes. In history the first appearance of Marathôn is when Peisistratos lands there on his return from exile. The second is when the son of Peisistratos led the Persian host thither, as a fitting place for the use of the cavalry which after all they seemed not to have used. No battle in history has been more minutely examined, and that in some cases by men who united technical military knowledge with a thorough knowledge of the country. Colonel Leake, to mention only one inquirer, has done all that the union of both qualities could do, though one is amazed at his constantly referring to Herodotus as a contemporary writer. Yet, after all his labours, after all the labours of Mr. Finlay and others, everybody complains that the narrative of Herodotus is unsatisfactory. The comments of Dean Blakesley strike us as among the most acute that have been made. One may doubt whether Herodotus had ever been there; he certainly shows no knowledge of the ground. He makes no mention of the marshes which form so marked a feature in the character of the Marathônian plain. The marshes lie between the sea and the fighting-ground, as the fighting-ground lies between the marsh and the mountains. The marsh is not only not mentioned by Herodotus, but his account seems almost inconsistent with its existence. But Pausanias saw the picture in the Poikilê which showed the Persians falling into the marsh. It is like appealing to the Bayeux Tapestry from the later accounts of the battle of Senlac. Pausanias, though he lived so many ages after, was in this way really nearer to the time than Herodotus. The picture commemorated the fact; Herodotus tells the story as it had grown up a generation later. By that time, as Dean Blakesley says, the story had come under the operation of the law by which “popular tradition rapidly drops all those particulars of a battle which evince strategic genius, and substitutes for them exaggerated accounts of personal bravery.” Miltiadês, as a good general, took advantage of the ground, and largely owed his success to the nature of the ground. Popular tradition made everything be done by sheer hard fighting.
In short, almost every detail of this memorable fight seems shrouded in uncertainty. It is hard to fix the exact position of either army, and the very name of Marathôn has perhaps shifted its place. The site of the old town seems quite as likely to be, not at the modern Marathôn, but, as Colonel Leake puts it, at Brana. Yet, amid all this doubt, there is essential certainty. Of the work that was done that day, of the general site, there is no doubt, and the most living and speaking monument of all is there to bear its witness. We stand, not, as the poet puts it, on the Persians’ grave, but on the mound which covers the ashes of the men of Athens who fell that day. Within the space between the bay with its blue waters and the hills which fence in the plain, the fate of Europe was fixed. We stand on the mound; the eye passes over the hills, from Probalinthos to the cape of Kynosoura. We look on the older and the newer candidate of the name of Marathôn; we look on the hill where older legends fixed the home of Pan, and where the later name of Drakonera speaks of some older or later dragon myth. We know that it was within these bounds that the might of Asia was broken by the force of two Hellenic cities. Standing on that mound, instead of dreaming, as the poet dreamed in the days of enslaved Greece, we may call to mind how, in the cycle of human things, another triumph of Europe over Asia was won on the same spot, and if there be, as other poets tell us, two special voices which call to freedom, no spot could be better chosen for the work that was done there than the Marathônian plain. Once that land was said to be
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