Marathon and the Tumulus of the Athenians

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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.