Marathon and the Tumulus of the Athenians

Assembled from 11 blocks · 2 evidence · 6 related

1. Story
2. The plain of Marathon in north-eastern Attica, about 42 km from Athens, where an Athenian and Plataean force defeated a Persian expedition in 490 BCE. At the centre of the plain stands the Soros, a burial mound about 10 m high and 50 m across raised over the ashes of the 192 Athenians who fell; it was excavated by Valerios Stais in 1891, five years before the first modern Olympic Games. The site gives the race its name and nothing else: no ancient source describes a commemorative run from here, and the modern event was designed in the 1890s around a nineteenth-century reading of the legend. The distance from Marathon to Athens is not 42.195 km by any road, and the coincidence of "about 42 km" with the standardised distance is exactly that.
3. Knowledge
4. Marathon and the Tumulus of the Athenians
5. Connections
6. Battle of Marathon
7. Valerios Stais excavates the Tumulus of the Athenians
8. The first modern Olympic marathon, Marathon to Athens
9. Evidence
10. The Soros at Marathon holds the ashes of 192 Athenians who fell in 490 BCE, stands about 10 m high with a diameter of about 50 m, and was excavated by Valerios Stais in 1891. V55 verification basis: read through an attributed search summary; the ministry page was not retrieved and the coordinate is taken from the standard reference entry for the Marathon tumuli rather than from this page.
11. Herodotus records that before the Battle of Marathon the Athenians sent a trained runner, named Pheidippides or Philippides, to Sparta to request help, and that he encountered Pan on Mount Parthenion; Herodotus records no run from Marathon to Athens. V55 verification basis: the chapter attribution and the absence of the Marathon-to-Athens run were read in encyclopaedic summary (Britannica, National Geographic); the Greek text was not consulted in this session.