Philippides26

Honors 2110B

Blog 1

September 20, 2016

Location of the Battle of Marathon

The Battle took place near the shore near modern day Marathon, Greece.  About 42km from Athens.  The location of the battle was chosen by the Persians because they landed their ships there because it was a best place for them to be able to use their cavalry effectively.

As you can see in the upper right-hand image, there were two marshes on either side of where the battle took place.  This turned out to be an important detail as the battle went on.

(Lendering, 2015)

Strategy and Tactics
 (Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License)

(The Battle of Marathon, n.d.)

The battle consisted of 10,000 Athenians against 25,000 Persians.  So in order for the Athenians to have a chance at winning they needed a good strategy.  What they did was have a thinner battle line in the middle and put more men on the flanks as they ran into battle.  The Athenians charged the Persians at full sprint and the battle commenced.  As the battle went on the outer edged of the Athenian army began to push back the Persians while the Persians pushed the Athenians back in the middle.  At that point the Athenian flanks turned inward on the Persians and surrounded them.  The Athenians completely surrounded the Persians and began to close in on them quickly.  The Persians began to drop quickly and began to retreat back to their ships and run along the shore.  The two big marshes made it so they couldn’t get very far and many drowned in the marshes and were killed trying to run away.  In the end it is said that 6,400 Persians died and only 194 Athenians died in battle.

Works Cited

Lendering, J. (2015, August 15). Marathon (490 BCE). Retrieved from Livius: http://www.livius.org/articles/battle/marathon-490-bce/

The Battle of Marathon. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon