The Origin of the Marathon: From Ancient Battle to Modern Endurance Sport

On a September morning in 490 BCE, a battle that would change history unfolded on the plain of Marathon, roughly 40 kilometers northeast of Athens. Yet the most celebrated scene from that battle — a soldier sprinting to Athens to announce victory, crying out “We have won!” before collapsing and dying — is almost certainly a fabrication. The historian who first set down that dramatic episode was writing more than 560 years after the Battle of Marathon took place.

And yet, today millions of people race through city streets to cover 42.195 kilometers. How did a tangle of historical fact and later fiction give rise to one of the most iconic events in the history of sport?

The Battle of Marathon: Democracy’s First Test

In 490 BCE, the Persian King Darius I launched an expedition to punish Athens. His pretext was that Athens had supported Ionian Greek cities that had revolted against Persian rule a few years earlier.^[1] A Persian army under Datis and Artaphernes crossed the Aegean and landed on the coastal plain of Marathon, on the northeastern tip of the Attic peninsula.

Athens was in a desperate position. The Athenian democracy was barely twenty years old at the time. Certain factions within Athens harbored ambitions of overturning democratic rule with Persian backing, which meant this battle was not merely a territorial dispute but a fight for the survival of the democratic system itself.^[2] Athens received a small contingent of reinforcements from its ally Plataea, but Sparta refused to send troops immediately, citing a religious festival.^[1]

On the eve of battle, Athens decided to send an envoy to Sparta requesting aid. The man chosen for this crucial mission was Pheidippides, a professional long-distance messenger known as a hemerodromos — literally, “one who runs all day.”^[3]

According to Herodotus, Pheidippides reached Sparta just two days after leaving Athens. By modern reckoning, that journey was approximately 246 kilometers.^[3] This run was the true historical record — yet it is an entirely different story that the world would come to remember.

In the battle itself, the Athenian forces under General Miltiades employed a brilliant tactical maneuver. They thinned their center and strengthened their flanks to encircle the Persian wings — a classic double envelopment.^[2] The close-packed hoplite phalanx overwhelmed the lightly armed Persian archers, and when the fighting was done, the Persians had lost approximately 6,400 men while the Athenian-Plataean force suffered only 192 casualties.^[1]

The Confusion of Two Stories: Herodotus vs. Plutarch

The most fascinating aspect of the marathon legend is that the story we know today is actually the product of two quite different events blended together.

What Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE) recorded was one thing only: Pheidippides’ round trip between Athens and Sparta before the battle. He wrote not a single word about a messenger running back to Athens after the battle to announce victory.^[3] Since Herodotus was active barely thirty to forty years after Marathon, a story he did not record was almost certainly either unknown or deemed untrustworthy in his day.

So when did the famous “runner who died delivering the news” story appear? The earliest source is attributed to Heraclides Ponticus, writing in the fourth century BCE. The first-century Roman historian Plutarch cited this account and recorded the name of the messenger who ran from Marathon to Athens, shouted “Rejoice, we are victorious! (Nenīkḗkamen),” and died — calling him either Eucles or Thersippus.^[3]

More intriguing still is the second-century Roman writer Lucianus, who gave the messenger’s name as Philippides rather than Pheidippides or Eucles. Through later scribal error or conflation, this name was eventually merged back with Pheidippides, fusing all accounts into the story of a single man.^[3] From a scholarly standpoint, the post-battle “victory run followed by death” story — entirely absent from the primary source Herodotus — is most likely a later invention.^[4]

The Modern Olympics and the Birth of the Race: Michel Bréal’s Proposal

Historically speaking, a “marathon race” never existed. The event itself was a fresh invention of the late nineteenth century. The man behind it was a French philologist and ardent admirer of ancient Greek culture: Michel Bréal.

At a conference on the revival of sport held at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1894, Bréal proposed an idea to his friend Pierre de Coubertin. In a letter dated 15 September 1894, Bréal suggested including a long-distance race in the 1896 Athens Olympics that would reenact the legendary run from the plain of Marathon to Athens, and he offered to donate a trophy for the winner personally.^[5]

The proposal carried special meaning for the Greek people. The 1896 Athens Olympic Organizing Committee recognized that this race would be the event most powerfully evoking the glory of ancient Greece, and public anticipation ran high well before the games began. When Greek athletes posted strong results in preliminary races, expectations rose even further.^[6]

On 10 April 1896, seventeen athletes — thirteen of them Greek — took their marks for a course of approximately 40 kilometers from the plain of Marathon to the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens.^[6] Some seven minutes before the leader reached the finish, a mounted messenger galloped into the stadium with news. “A Greek! A Greek is in the lead!” Nearly 100,000 spectators erupted in cheers as 24-year-old water carrier Spiridon Louis crossed the finish line in 2 hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds.^[6]

The moment of triumph was more dramatic than any fiction. Greek Prince Georgios and Crown Prince Konstantinos came out to the stadium entrance to meet Louis, running with him to the finish line. Overnight, Louis became a national hero, and several Greek citizens reportedly offered him their land, horses, and even their daughters as gifts.^[7]

The Peculiar Number: 42.195 Kilometers

That the modern marathon is run over 42.195 kilometers is widely known. But why that oddly specific figure? The distance was not determined by any sporting rationale — it was set at the request of the British Royal Family.

The distances run in early Olympic marathons varied considerably. The 1896 Athens race was approximately 40 kilometers; the 1900 Paris race was 40.26 kilometers; and the 1904 St. Louis race was 41 kilometers. The distance that serves as the standard today was first established at the 1908 London Olympics.^[8]

The London organizing committee had initially planned a distance of 25 miles (roughly 40.2 kilometers). Then came two royal requests. First, the starting line was moved to fall directly beneath the windows of the Royal Nursery at Windsor Castle, extending the course to 26 miles. Then, at the request of Princess Mary, the starting position was adjusted to align exactly with the window, and when British officials also repositioned the finish line, the final distance came out to 26 miles and 385 yards — 42.195 kilometers.^[8]

This distance became fixed in the world’s memory alongside the dramatic events of that 1908 race. Italian runner Dorando Pietri collapsed from exhaustion just before the finish line and was helped across by race officials, only to be disqualified because of that assistance.^[8] The scene was reported widely by the international press, turning the marathon into a famous sport at a stroke. The International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) adopted this distance as the official marathon standard in 1921.^[8]

Fighting the Wall: The History of Women Marathoners

There are names that were long erased from the history of the marathon. They belong to women.

For much of the sport’s history, the medical establishment and sporting authorities insisted that women were physically incapable of running long distances. The 1896 Olympic Organizing Committee barred women from the marathon; when a Greek woman, Stamata Revithi, ran the same course alone the day after the official race, her effort was not recognized as an official result.^[9]

The true turning point came on 19 April 1967. Kathrine Switzer, who had entered the Boston Marathon under the name “K.V. Switzer,” became the first woman to run the race wearing an official bib number. Midway through the race, meet official Jock Semple lunged at her, attempting to tear off her number, and the moment was captured on camera and transmitted around the world.^[9] Switzer finished the course, and the photograph remains one of the most iconic images in the history of women’s sport.

Boston officially opened its marathon to women in 1972. Women’s marathon was not added to the Olympic program until the 1984 Los Angeles Games — a change in which the Avon International Running Circuit, founded by Switzer in 1977, played a significant role.^[9]

The Age of the Citizens’ Marathon: Running Goes to the People

Until the 1970s, the marathon was a sport for a small elite. The history of the mass public marathon begins with the founding of the New York City Marathon in 1970. Just 127 runners entered the first edition. Then in 1976, Fred Lebow redesigned the course to pass through all five boroughs of New York City; participation surged to more than 2,000, and by the 1980s the field had exceeded 20,000.^[10]

The Boston Marathon started in 1897 with just 15 entrants and today attracts more than 30,000 finishers each year, making it the world’s most storied marathon.^[10] At the core of this growth was a social transformation that went beyond a simple rise in the sport’s popularity. The wheelchair division was introduced at Boston in 1975, and from the 1980s onward the race became linked to charitable fundraising, transforming it from a mere competition into a community event.^[10]

Today the world’s major city marathons — Tokyo, Berlin, Chicago, London, Boston, and New York, the “World Marathon Majors” — draw tens of thousands of participants each year. By 2019, an estimated 1.13 million people had completed a marathon somewhere in the world.^[10] In the early twentieth century, the medical community warned that it was dangerous for a non-specialist to run 42 kilometers. The millions of amateur runners who ignored that warning proved it wrong with their own bodies.

When Legend Replaces Fact

The marathon as a sport originates in a historical event, but it was myth and romanticization that gave it its final shape. That Pheidippides ran to Sparta is a fact recorded by Herodotus. That he ran from Marathon to Athens and died in the attempt is a story that appeared five centuries or more after the fact. The distance of 42.195 kilometers has no connection to Greek history whatsoever — it was determined by the position of a window in a British royal residence. Women were excluded from the event for a long time, and only reached the Olympic stage in the 1980s.

And yet the marathon is today one of the sports that draws the broadest public participation of any athletic discipline. Therein lies the paradox. What matters is not whether the story on which the event rests is true or false, but what desire regarding human limits that story touched. The account of the people who risked their lives on the plain of Marathon in 490 BCE to defend Athens was already powerful enough on its own — without any of the dramatic details added later. That later generations layered legend over fact was perhaps an attempt to express an emotional truth that the bare facts alone could not quite convey.