Original subtitles

On the narrow plain of Marathon in eastern Greece, a battle rages that will

alter the course of western civilization.

On one side, the army of the Persian Empire, the most powerful fighting force

the world.

On the other side, the army of Athens, half its size, led by the famed Greek

general Miltiades.

This is a battle of military brilliance in the face of overwhelming odds.

A battle for the future of Greece and for the supremacy of the ancient world.

Two civilizations are about to collide.

Eat meat west on the plains of Marathon.

Death comes swiftly.

For six days, a brutal attack by a faceless invader stains the soil red.

Those not butchered are enslaved.

The aggressors are the heavy infantry of the mighty Persian Empire.

They are called immortals.

The victims are residents of the island of Euboea in the Greek city of Eritrea.

600 Persian warships had set sail on the Aegean Sea and swallowed every Greek

island in their path.

But Euboea is not their final destination.

They're heading to Athens.

Five -year -old commander.

Alexander the Great.

It's his time now.

Alexander has a kind of larger -than -life aura about him.

He's handsome with a muscular build, and he's extremely charismatic.

His troops pretty much worship him.

In less than five years, he had managed to carry out a major strategic plan from

Greece to invade... Persia and destroy the Persian Empire.

In five years he managed to suppress his own domestic opposition and then

finally was able to force a cataclysmic battle in modern day Iraq on the plains

of Arbela where he destroyed the last remaining Persian army and then by right

of conquest became emperor of all of Persia.

Some say Alexander's pedigree destined him for greatness.

They believe he's a descendant of Hercules on his father's side and

his mother's.

Alexander's empire now stretches from Greece to Egypt to modern -day

Afghanistan, one of the largest in the history of the world.

But Alexander's appetite for power and glory is insatiable.

Five years after he defeats the Persians, Alexander is ready to take on

opponent.

He stands with his 32 ,000 battle -tested soldiers along the banks of the

down to Athens, Corinth, Bata, all those states whose names pop up in history.

Each city -state was a self -contained society.

It had its own lands, its own army.

But aboard his warship...

The Persian commander, Datis, cares about only one of these city -states,

Athens.

He's so confident he'll be able to destroy this historic city, the only

in his mind is exactly how he'll destroy it.

He can either attack Athens directly from the sea, is one possibility.

This is a bit difficult. Athens is walled, and an amphibious assault from

sea against opposition is pretty iffy business.

He decides not to attack Athens head -on, rather to pick a spot about 25

away from the city, along his line of route, and to land there and figure one

two things would happen.

Either the Greek army responds and comes up to meet him, or he would land,

assemble his army, and simply march on to Athens from the ground. So given the

choice between the land campaign or an amphibious landing of Athens itself, he

chooses the land campaign.

Datis directs his fleet of 600 ships about 26 miles away from Athens at

Marathon.

He moors his ships in Marathon Bay and disembarks on the skinniest beach.

The Persians then make camp on the northeast side of the plain, next to the

Great Marsh.

The Persian army is about to slam into Athens like a Category 5 hurricane.

The Athenians know surrender isn't an option, but they're divided on how to

prepare. Should they hunker down behind the city walls or march out to meet the

Persians in battle?

Some Anathans believe that an open field battle against the Persians is suicide.

But one Athenian disagrees. His name is Miltiades, and he has a personal history

with the Persians.

Miltiades is a very interesting character.

He comes from a prominent family in Athens, and when he's about 35, he takes

over a Greek colony in Ionia, on the edge of the Persian Empire.

He rules there as a tyrant. That makes him very unpopular in Athens.

In the late 6th century BC, Miltiades' home on the Hellespont Peninsula is

engulfed by the expanding Persian Empire.

He's forced into military service.

Now wielding a Persian sword, he must fight along his conqueror.

The Persians soon spread north, cross the Danube River, and invade Scythia,

modern -day Eastern Europe and Asia.

Miltiades was in charge of guarding the bridges across the Danube over which the

Persian army had come in order to go into Scythia and prosecute the campaign.

Finally, after three long years in Scythia, Miltiades decided he had

Miltiades had never been a big fan of the Persians, and he tried to get other

Greek generals to agree that what we ought to do is burn the bridges behind

Darius and his army and let them die of starvation or be killed by the

Scythians.

Other Greeks would not go along with it, but it was Miltiades' idea, and it was

picked up by Persian intelligence.

So Persian intelligence were not very happy with... Miltiades, as you might

expect.

Miltiades flees to Athens, but he's not welcome there either.

The people of Athens still remember Miltiades as a tyrant and lock him up at

first chance they get.

Three years after his arrival in Athens, Miltiades faces the death sentence for

tyranny, but he's got an ace in the hole. He knows the Persian game.

and the Persians are on their way, looking to destroy Athens.

The Athenians not only spare Miltiades' life, they make him a general.

But Miltiades has to wonder which fate is worse, execution or being hacked to

little bitty bits by the Persian warriors.

Miltiades chooses to face the Persian blade, and rather than hide behind the

walls of Athens, He wants to meet the Persians on the battlefield.

But the final decision on whether to fight is not his to make.

Athenian democracy extends to the army, too.

So when an argument erupts over what to do at Marathon, the council of ten

generals must decide what to do.

Attack now, or retreat and try to get help from other Greek city -states.

The vote is five to five.

The tie -breaking vote falls to a man named Callimachus.

He is the polemarch.

It's a ceremonial position in the Athenian army.

Miltiades makes an impassioned case to Callimachus, saying, it's up to you

whether Athens is reduced to slavery or rise to become the greatest of all the

Greek city -states.

He explains that failure to fight now will shatter the democracy along factual

lines and make them easy prey for the Persians.

Callimachus is convinced, and he votes to attack.

Miltiades gets his war.

He leads the entire Athenian army, roughly 10 ,000 strong, 26 miles east to

plains of Marathon.

The odds are overwhelmingly against Miltiades. The Persian force is

More than twice the Athenian size.

20 ,000 infantry, 3 ,000 archers, 2 ,000 cavalry.

Miltiades takes a look at the situation and realizes immediately he's severely

outnumbered. Not only outnumbered, he's outgunned in the sense that there are

fairly substantial archer and cavalry contingents.

Even if the Athenians can hold back the Persian infantry, they have no way to

counter the Persian warhorses.

It's a massive mismatch.

Cavalry is one of the keys to Persian military success.

They were one of the first armies to fully integrate horses and heavy

for a devastating one -two punch.

And funnel their enemies into the chomping jaws of their main infantry

Miltiades is outnumbered and outgunned. The Athenians have never faced a force

like this before.

But they have cut their teeth on some of the greatest warriors of the ancient

world.

For centuries, these two Greek city -states shed each other's blood. But 50

years before Miltiades faces the Persians, a conflict erupts between the

neighbors that will ultimately lead to the Battle of Marathon.

It's 540 B .C., 50 years before the Battle of Marathon.

Two Greek city -states, Athens and Sparta, attack each other on the open

battlefield.

The rivalry between Athens and Sparta is kind of like Michigan versus Ohio

State, except with spears.

They constantly seek any advantage they can over one another.

While most of their battles are provincial squabbles,

One of them gets the Persians involved and eventually leads the battle

Athens is known as the birthplace of democracy.

Sparta, their neighbor to the west, couldn't be more different.

Imagine that the U .S. Marines had their own country.

That's Sparta.

They train constantly, weapons, tactics, armor.

It's pretty much all they do.

Now, the Athenian -Spartan relationship is very bipolar.

Sometimes they help each other, and sometimes they fight.

At the time, Athens is ruled by a man named Hippias.

He is, however, wildly unpopular with the Athenian aristocrats.

So they plot a coup and overthrow Hippias with the help of some unlikely

the Spartans.

Now, the problem with the Spartans helping you is that they wouldn't go

And that was the problem that the Athenians had, was how to get rid of the

Spartans. Well, they rose in revolt and drove the Spartans out of Athens.

And it was that period about 540 B .C., which was the beginning of Athenian

democracy at about this time. The problem was this.

Inevitably, one would expect the Spartans to counterattack.

Athens believed they need an ally to defend themselves against Sparta.

They turned to the Persian Empire.

So that's one of the first examples in Greek history of a smaller state trying

to ally itself with a larger state, in this case the Persian Empire, in order

protect itself from aggression of another state, in this case Sparta.

Athens sends an envoy to the Persian province of Ionia, now modern -day

At the court of the Persian governor, the envoy asks for Persian help against

Sparta.

The Persian governor agrees, but on one condition.

The Athenians must make a sacred offer of earth and water.

The trouble is, the Athenians don't really understand what the offer of

and water means. They think they're signing a treaty, just like the treaties

they've made in the past with other Greek city -states. But to the Persians,

accepting earth and water means they own Athens. It has become their colony.

Without understanding what they're really doing, the envoys submit to

rule. All of Athens will pay dearly for this mistake.

It made no sense to the rational Greeks. I mean, these are the people who

invented logic, mathematics, and philosophy.

For them, it was just a silly little ritual that really meant nothing.

Now, the problem then is the same problem now. When you have two cultures

reaching an agreement, Sometimes that agreement means different things to each

party because the cultural context in which it occurs is different.

Athens secures the promise of Persian protection, but Sparta attacks so

Athens has no time to call on her new ally.

Determined to keep their new democracy, Athenians fight more ferociously than

ever. They defeat the Spartan invasion on their own.

Now, this is important because Athens had asked the Persians for help, but

don't need it. They defeated Sparta all by themselves.

The Athenians now felt that the agreement they had made with the

null and void and made the terrible mistake of telling the Persians that.

This infuriates the Persian emperor, Darius I.

It amounted, in the Persian view, to little more than an open revolt.

And Darius resolved that he was going to bring Athens to heel.

The Persians send heralds to Athens and demand payment of customary taxes.

The Athenians throw them into a pit to die.

Athens has spit in the face of the world's most powerful empire.

Throughout history, alliances often come with unintended consequences, but few

have the magnitude of the one of the treaty between Athens and Persia. If the

Athenians never asked for Persian help against the Spartans, the world might be

a completely different place today. It sets off centuries of conflict between

the East and the West.

And the first major battle is Marathon, where more than 20 ,000 Persian

infantry, cavalry, and archers are preparing to burn Athens to the ground.

The Athenian general Metaites and 10 ,000 Greek infantrymen are colossally

overmatched. But Metaites does have one advantage.

How does he offset the...

that he suffers relative to the Persian forces.

And the answer is almost always in antiquity is the same.

Terrain, terrain, terrain.

Location, location, location.

Historians debate the exact route the Persians would have taken to get from

Marathon to Athens.

Some believe they would have taken the coastal route, a route that passes

through the Rexiza Swamp.

But then you would have to go through a swamp, which was doable.

But then you would have been in a problem where the Persian army would

in column of march, trying to gain the road with the Athenian army on its

Always a bad idea.

The only other way to Athens is through the mountains, beginning at the Vrana

Valley.

If the Persian army intends to invade Athens, it's got to go through the mouth

of that valley.

And it's not very wide.

It's not very wide.

So what Miltiades does, he decides to block the valley.

And he deploys his troops in the mouth of the Vrana Valley in order to make it

impossible for the Persians to advance further.

Miltiades has positioned his infantry in the valley like a cork in a bottle.

The Athenian phalanx is made up of lines of tightly organized interlocking

warriors.

They can move forward and back easily, but not side to side.

The phalanx formation is incredibly effective at holding ground and moving

forward. With rows of mimpak tightly together, they use each other's

shills to form an armored wall.

Miltiades anchors his flanks on the rocky sides of the hill and then goes

chopping down trees to put them on the flanks as well.

Why does he do this?

He's well aware of the fact that the weakness of the Greek phalanx is its

flanks. Whenever it has died in battle, it has died because it has been taken in

the flanks, either by another phalanx or mostly by cavalry.

In the valley, the flanks of the phalanx are well protected.

So not going to rely on the steepness and the rocks alone. You pile it with

brush and trees and logs so that there can't be any cavalry attack.

So just by positioning his troops where he has, he has essentially taken the

cavalry out of the fight.

Brilliant maneuver.

The Persian commander, Datis, is not concerned and assembles his infantry.

For three days, the Persians line up for battle.

But the Greeks choose not to engage them and stay in their protective zone.

It wins the day if there's no fight at all.

Its job, essentially, is to protect Athens by blocking the road.

So if you would like to stay here for several weeks, that was quite okay with

Miltiades. It's not okay, of course, with the Persians.

Finally, the frustrated Persians initiate an attack.

The Athenians form up for battle.

But the Persians do not immediately send in their infantry.

They first launch a blistering mirage of arrow fire.

Under a tidal wave of missiles, there is nowhere for the Athenians to hide.

490 B .C.

It's the Athenian Greeks versus the mighty Persians on the plains of

The Persians draw first with a devastating arrow attack.

You can imagine this wall of mist literally blocking out the sun, raining

on the Athenians.

But you know what? The Athenians brushed the arrow fire away like annoying

gnats.

Thousands of Persian arrows.

Very few Athenian casualties.

And despite being outnumbered two to one, the Athenians, led by General

Mattiades, taunt the Persians.

The Persians are on a mission.

Break through the wall of Greek soldiers.

March to Athens.

and burn the city to the ground.

Exactly what happens next is up for debate.

Every historian has a theory of what went down at Marathon and why.

And that's because we only have one real source, the Greek historian Herodotus.

The problem is that Herodotus is more like the world's first blogger than an

objective historian.

He blends events, myths, anecdotes.

hearsay into this great story but nobody in the right mind believes it's all

true so who attacked who first marathon and why well from the athenian position

there's no need to attack anyone but datis the persian commander is itching

a fight after the failed missile attack there's only one thing for him to do

all that's left is a frontal assault now you're going to have to mix it up head

-on, one -on -one.

10 ,000 Persian light infantrymen charge across the marathon plain.

Waiting for them is the Athenian phalanx, a bronze wall of spears and

More than a million pounds of flesh and bone collide.

Helping the Athenians create this wall, is the Hoplon Shield.

The Greek shield known as the Hoplon is more than just a glorified garbage can

lid. It's a revolutionary innovation in warfare.

The Hoplon is a large, circular, bowl -shaped shield made of wood and faced

bronze.

It can withstand arrows and punishing sword blows without splintering.

But what makes it truly remarkable is what's called an argive grip.

The soldier passes his arm through a leather loop in the middle of the shield

and holds onto a handle near the rim.

And why this is important is it gives you very good control and much more

with the shield, whereas the old tether grip in the center wouldn't allow you to

produce a lot of force with it.

The Athenians stop the crushing charge.

Now, they go on the offensive.

The Athenians' primary weapon is the heavy ashwood spear called the dory.

Seven feet long, tipped with sharpened iron, the dory can smash through shields

and armor.

This spear is not prone.

It's used to stab the enemy with a gruesome thrust.

In the 6th century BC, most Athenian warriors wear lightweight lamellar armor

made of bonded strips of linen and leather.

Some, however, wear heavy, rigid cuirassies, bronze plates sculpted to

a muscular torso.

Bronze helmets with distinctive horsehair plumes protect their heads.

while greaves protect their lower legs.

In full battle gear, the hoplites are armored head to toe.

The problem for the Persians at Marathon is they're up against a determined

Athenian phalanx that doesn't scatter during the arrow barrage.

The Persian light infantry also doesn't have their usual cavalry support.

So it's just sickle swords and wicker shields against a bronze wall of

Athenians.

The Persian commander Data sends in wave after wave of light infantry assaults.

Each time, however, they impale themselves on the solid Athenian wall of

The Persians are unrelenting.

Defeat is not an option.

The issue of imperial prestige is at stake. I mean, what in all hell's name

could possibly have motivated this pipsqueak of a nation as... backwater to

insult the largest empire on earth.

For the Persians, Marathon is about more than just a broken treaty.

It's also punishment for Athens' support of a revolution against Persia ten

years earlier in nearby Ionia.

Once an Athenian Greek colony, Ionia was absorbed as a province by the Persian

Empire in 540 BC.

But 40 years later, in 500 BC, a local tyrant incited a revolution.

The people of Ionia then asked Athens for help.

Athens was seen by her colonies as kind of the mother country. And my guess,

Athens considered herself the mother country.

And so when her colonies asked for help...

She sent groups. It was a mistake of the First Order, to be sure, but that's

probably what motivated it. It certainly could not possibly be justified on the

grounds of rational self -interest.

The Athenians were joined by a force from Eritrea, in nearby Euboea.

They sailed across the Aegean to Ionia and stormed the capital of Sardis.

It is another Athenian slap in the face the Persians will never forget.

500 BC, ten years before the Battle of Marathon, the Ionian Revolt has begun.

Several Greek contingents, including Athenians, attack Persian -controlled

Sardis, the Ionian capital, and burn the city to the ground.

To make matters worse for Persia, at the same time they are fighting wars in

India, Egypt, and Scythia.

The Ionian rebels score a major blow, but the victory is short -lived.

The Persians increased their force level and began to suppress the Ionian

revolt. The Athenians, knowing that discussion was the better part of valet,

went home, as did the Eboeans. And the Ionian revolt simmered on and

off for the next five years until it finally simmered out and flared out and

Persia recaptured the Ionian coast.

But the Persian king Darius is furious.

He vows vengeance.

Darius calls upon his God to grant him vengeance against the Athenians. He even

makes a servant come up to him three times every night during dinner and

in his ear, Sire, remember the Athenians.

So even while he's dealing with Egypt and wars in India and Scythia, Athenian

payback is always on his mind.

King Darius attempts to exact revenge on the Athenians at 490 BC at Marathon.

But so far, the Athenians have survived a massive Persian missile attack.

And now they are holding fast against the Persian light infantry.

General Mataites has brilliantly positioned his defensive force.

The Greek heavy infantry phalanxes are jammed in a narrow opening between the

mountains, blocking the path to Athens.

The Persians had chosen the battlefield, okay, by landing at Marathon, but the

Athenians had chosen the terrain by using it to maximum advantage. And it's

old trick.

But an effective one, as the Persian light infantry doesn't even dent the

Athenian wall.

The Persian light infantry retreats, but now Miltiades must face the elite force

of the Persian army, the heavy infantry, the immortals.

The legendary immortals are the stormtroopers of the Persian empire.

Faceless, they march into battle in complete silence.

They are the Athenians' worst nightmare.

In addition to their brutal killing ability, The presence of the immortals

forces Miltiades to change his tactics.

Miltiades, although he has prepared the battlefield expertly and to give him

every advantage, still suffers from a great disadvantage. And that is the area

in which he occupies, although it's relatively narrow, okay, is still wider

than he has sufficient troops to cover.

What he does is he weakens his center and moves the additional troops out. So

that when you look at the deployment of the Athenian force, you're looking at a

force that is relatively thin in the center, but has heavy phalanxes on

side.

Weakening the center of its phalanx is a huge gamble.

But then Miltiades rolls the dice again.

He advances his line out of the protective valley.

If he stays where he is, he knows that when the center gets hit, it's going to

flex in.

The problem when it flexes in, if he stays where he is, is there's not enough

room for his heavy phalanxes on the end to maneuver inward.

There's not enough room. They're jammed up against the terrain.

So he has a very, very delicate tactical problem, and it's this.

Miltiades must move his troops far enough to be able to extend his line so

phalanxes can maneuver.

The trick is, how far can Miltiades move out from the valley?

If he doesn't come out far enough, his flanks can't maneuver.

If he comes out too far, the Persians can get around his flanks and surround

him. And remember, all this is happening on the fly.

Miltiades won't know how far is too far until it happens.

The immortals close in.

Miltiades needs to make his move.

He orders his troops to redeploy.

Herodotus tells us that Marathon is the first time the Greek hoplites ever ran

into battle.

And the reason they'd never done it before is that it's exhausting.

The Greeks wear all this heavy armor and carry long spears.

So running just wastes a lot of energy.

The other problem with running is the tight phalanx formation itself.

Their strength lies in their unit cohesion.

If that breaks apart as they advance, they're immediately vulnerable.

My guess is that Herodotus is describing a redeployment at the run, not a

movement to contact at the run. At a given signal, everybody moved in as

format as they could, moved out to 200 yards, stopped, and then reformed.

very quickly, so that by the time actual contact occurred with the Persians,

okay, the units were once more disciplined, ranks were dressed, ready

the charge.

While historians debate many aspects of the Battle of Marathon, most agree about

what happens next, an apocalypse of violence.

The armies collide in a horrifying maelstrom of bronze and blood.

The battle is so intense that some Greeks report crazed visions of ghost

warriors crashed through the lines and cut down men at random.

But the reality is just as terrifying.

The Persians surge forward, and the Athenians are beaten back.

The weak center can't withstand the Persian attack. It's about to break.

getting pushed back, back, back towards the valley.

The hoplite dam is about to burst, and it looks like Athens is doomed.

Miltiades' center is on the brink of collapse, but at the flanks, it's a

different story.

The normal tactics for the Persian infantry would have been to put the

units in the middle and the weaker units on the wings.

This is because the wings are usually supported by cavalry.

Now, Miltiades would know this, and it may be why he bolsters his own forces on

the flanks.

With the Persian cavalry rendered ineffective by the terrain, the

able to chop down the weakened Persian flanks.

The center of the Athenian line continues to be pushed back while the

hold strong.

Herodotus tells us that just before the center broke, they were rallied by their

officers to find new courage and actually counterattack.

They counterattacked enough to stop the forward movement in the center.

And at that point, the heavy phalanxes on the wings, bang, closed in on the

side.

Took them in the flanks, literally had them in the V, and literally slaughtered

them.

In a daring stroke of military brilliance, Miltiades has completely

tables on the Persians.

The Battle of Marathon has become a Persian bloodbath.

While keeping his flanks anchored, the Athenian general Miltiades has pulled

center of his line back, drawing the Persian infantry into a death trap.

Hemmed in on three sides, the Persians can't maneuver.

One of the reasons for their panic probably was something caused by the fog

war and by something that happens to men in battle no matter how well they are

trained or how well you are disciplined.

Every now and again, the disease of fear gets into your soul.

And when that happens and panic gets into your ranks, you're done.

You can't stop it, no matter how disciplined you are, how controlled you

More than 6 ,000 Persians perish, while the Athenians lose fewer than 200.

Among the Athenian dead, however, is Calamac, whose tie -breaking vote pushed

the Athenians into battle.

Some cite Marathon as the first known example of the pincer maneuver, or

called a double envelopment.

But this isn't truly the case, because Miltiades only uses one force, so he

not completely envelop the enemy. The Persians still have an avenue of

And they use it. The Persians race back toward the beach.

Some say the Athenians immediately chase the Persians back to their ships, but

this is pretty unlikely.

since the Athenians would be completely exhausted at this point.

What likely happened is Miltiades and his men rested until they were able to

back on the offensive.

It took a considerable time for the Persians to try to grab what's left,

wounded, their horses, and put them on, try to get them on the boats.

It might have taken several hours, eight, ten hours.

At some point...

The Greeks were arrested, and at some point they reformed, and now they began,

pursuit is too strong a word, they began literally marching towards the beach in

order to encourage, let us say, the Persians to leave.

Fighting breaks out again as the Persian rearguard tries to protect the retreat.

Athenians butchered them and captured seven of the fleeting boats.

and tries to hold it on the beach with his teeth.

This is the kind of hyperbole that Herodotus is known for.

The Athenians route the Persian infantry, but the danger isn't over yet.

The Persians aren't sailing back to Asia. They're heading straight for

Miltiades sends a Greek messenger from Marathon to Athens with news of the

victory.

The Athenian runs the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens, runs into the town

square, yells up his hands, Nike, which means victory, and drops dead, probably

of a heart attack or a stroke.

And this is where we get the phrase, to run a marathon. 26 miles, the distance

from Marathon to Athens.

But at the same time that this inaugural race is being run,

Miltiades realizes that the fight is not yet over.

Once Miltiades realizes what the Persians are doing, he sends another

back to Athens to alert them. Then he assembles his troops for a forced night

march back to the city.

It's hard to imagine how tired these infantry guys are at this point, but if

they hope to save Athens, they have to keep going.

The Athenians march all night long.

It's difficult to know how long it would take the Persian ships to sail to

Athens from Marathon, a distance of about 62 miles by sea.

While a ship of that day could make the trip in about 10 hours, a lot would

depend on the current weather condition, weight that the ship was carrying.

Also, it's possible that some of the ships with the cavalry might have

sailed for Athens a day or so before.

can't be sure if he had won the battle and lost the war.

Early the next morning, the Persian commander Datis enters the Athenian

with his 600 ships.

On the walls of the city, he sees Miltiades and the entire Athenian army.

Datis takes one look at this, understands the difficulties involved of

out an opposed amphibious landing, decides better of it.

turns to the cocksman, turn the boat around.

The fleet turns around and sails back to Persia.

And Athens remains free.

As the Persians sail away, the Athenian infantry can finally celebrate their

amazing victory at Marathon.

To commemorate the victory, the Athenians build one of the most iconic

in human history, the Parthenon, a massive temple to the goddess Athena.

Carved into the wall of the Parthenon are 192 figures, one for each of the

Athenian slain at Marathon.

After the defeated Marathon, Datis returns to the court of King Darius.

Some suggest he executed for his failure.

And while there's no evidence for this, history never hears from Datis again.

But what we do know is that Darius was furious.

Furious because this pygmy little barbaric state has insulted the great

of Persia yet again and got away with it.

Darius swears in his mind that if he lives long enough, he will have his

on the Athenians.

As it turns out, of course, he doesn't live long enough.

Persian revenge for Marathon falls to Darius' son, Xerxes, who 40 years after

Marathon personally travels to Greece.

to fulfill his father's wishes.

This transmission of the desire for revenge against

Athens sets up, 40 years later, one of the

signature battles of Western military history, the last stand

of the 300 at the Pass of Thermopylae.

At Thermopylae, the great Spartan commander Leonidas uses the same tactics

against the Persians that Miltiades did nearly half a century earlier at

Marathon.

Marathon itself is one of those moments that is defining in Western history.

In fact, it defines what it is to be Western and Greek over

against Persian and Eastern.

It's not the end of the story.

In fact, it's just the beginning of the story.

The Battle of Marathon tells the ancient world that Persia isn't invincible.

It serves as a battle cry for future rebellion throughout the empire.

Greece and Persia will continue to clash on and off for the next hundred years.

The struggle catapults Greece from obscurity into the center stage of the

ancient world.

It all begins on the blood -soaked wing of Marathon.