Pheidippides

person · earth · Attica

The Athenian long-distance messenger from whom the marathon takes its story rather than its name. What the earliest source actually says is narrow: Herodotus, Histories VI.105-106, records that before the battle the Athenians sent a trained runner, Pheidippides or Philippides, to Sparta to ask for help, a journey of roughly 250 km, and that he met the god Pan on Mount Parthenion on the way. Herodotus says nothing at all about a run from Marathon to Athens. That run appears centuries later — Plutarch, writing about five hundred years afterwards, names other messengers, and Lucian names Philippides — and the modern form of the story, with the collapse and the cry of victory, comes from Robert Browning's 1879 poem. The historical figure and the legend are separate objects, and the sport is descended from the legend.