Chuck Rathfelder

May 18,1998

Reaction Paper B

There are certain events in history—perhaps a dozen or so, I would think—that simply are more important than others, more decisive and pivotal, events upon which the rest of recorded history after that event depend. One of those events, I think, is the Battle of Marathon. It is the tendency of the historian of today to attempt to "reevaluate" the things that people have always thought true, and to downplay the importance of certain events, such as Marathon, which have always been recognized as being pivotal. I think, though, that this tendency is, in most cases, a bad one. Obviously, it’s important to look not only at individual events in analyzing history, but also at trends, movements, and the like, but it’s also important that we recognize how absolutely important individual courage and inventiveness can be in determining the course of history. Marathon is an example of such an event, an event that was so monumental that to forget the "heroic" aspect of it is not only to disgrace the men that two and a half millenia ago, laid the foundations for our society, but also serves to demean the entire field of historical analysis. I think the way that our book handles the battle at Marathon(as well as the other decisive events defining Greek-Persian interactions, such as Plataea and Thermopylae)is very good, not only does the book recognize the role of fortune in the Greek victory, but it still manages to preserve the fact that the battle was not simply another military victory for the Greeks, that it was one of the amazing victories of antiquity, and to forget this fact would be a disgrace to the people who preserved in writing the records of the battle.

In retrospect, perhaps, we can see in the hard-fought battles between the mighty persian Empire and the tiny city-states of Ionian Greece an indication of the glory that Greece would later attain. At the time, however, it seemed that the Persian Empire—led by a people considered by many Greeks superior in battle, encompassing cities that could put any in Europe to shame both in terms of size and of age, and seemingly destined to conquer the entire world—was so much more powerful than the whole of Greece as to not even merit comparison. After conquering Lydia and the rest of Aetolian Greece, the armies of Persia proceeded to march against, and defeat, the great Eastern empires, of which Greece was so jealous, the great walled Babylon, and Egypt. When Darius set his mind to remembering every day the impudent little state of Athens that had dared to defy him, it seemed that Greek civilization, still relatively in it’s infancy, was doomed to suffer the same fate that had befallen everyone else that had dared to stand up against the most powerful empire that had ever existed. The Greeks, however, in typical Homeric fashion, didn’t exactly see things that way. Oh, they knew of the victories of the Persians, they knew what kind of odds they were going up against, but they were Greeks, and they’d been sharpening their fighting skills for centuries, mostly on each other, and were now ready to step into the limelight of world history. They would not give up without a fight, no matter what the odds against them.

The days when the Greeks stood on the hills above the plain of Marathon, debating whether or not they should attack the Persian host were days where, literally, the history of the entire world hung in the balance. Should the Greeks have fallen to the Persians, there would have been nothing to stop the Persians from eventually marching all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, and subjecting the whole of Europe to the arbitrary and despotic form of corrupt and decadent government which has always characterized Eastern monarchies. Certainly, the Persian armies would not have had an easy time subjecting the powerful and free people of Italy, and especially, of Northern Europe, but the truth is that the Greeks had by far the most advanced European civilization of the time, and no people west of Greece had the administrative capability or the organization needed to put up a fight against the Persians. Doubtlessly the Persians would have taken the inhabitants of Western Europe, and scattered them throughout the Persian world, as they had done with other defeated people, a tactic Eastern empires, such as the Assyrians had long been using to prevent civil unrest. Thus, whether the Athenians knew it or not, the entire fate of the western world, and, indirectly, of the civilization of the entire world rested in their hands. Miltiades had served with the Persians in the Northeast, and he knew that the Greeks were superior fighters in terms of discipline, bravery and weaponry, and he urged the Athenians to attack, not only because he thought they could win, but, probably more importantly, because he suspected, and rightly so, as he found out just after the battle, that someone in the city would be willing to betray the city to the Persians. Perhaps he knew that, even if he did wait for the Spartans, it would be too late, and, if Athens had fallen in 490 B.C., perhaps he knew that the chances of Greece later fully repulsing the Persians were very small indeed. Surely, the Spartans would probably have fought the Persians to the very last man, and would have provided another battle as memorable as the stand they made against Xerxes’ millions at Thermopylae, but once the Persians had a foothold in Greece, they would have been unstoppable. In essence, the victory of the Athenians at Marathon served as a sort of wake up call to all of Greece, and revealed just how powerful the Greeks had the potential to be. In this first major battle between European culture and Middle Eastern culture, the Greeks won the victory not only for themselves but for everyone that followed after them. The Greeks were able to "shield" western Europe from the East, preventing the East from imposing on the west the oppressive, stifling culture that prevented Eastern civilizations—so much older than the civilizations of the West—from advancing at a level comparable with that of the west, once the west came into it’s own. Obviously, the Battle of Marathon was not the final blow in the meeting between the Greeks and the Persians, the Spartans would go on to win perhaps an even more astounding victory at Plataea, and the Greeks would again show their superiority in war in the naval battle at Artemisium, but these great victories were merely reaffirming the trend that had been formed by the Athenians at Marathon. Marathon marked a true turning point in World history, and served to validate the democratic ideals of the Greeks. In an age where tiny city-states could vie on the battlefield with the greatest empire the world had ever seen, it became apparent that the Greek society, which encouraged individualism, and let each man be—to an extent far exceeding anything in the east, at least—his own master, was a superior society, a fact which subsequent history has reaffirmed time and time again. To forget the extroardinary aspect of events such as this is an injustice to the heritage of the entire world, and also an affront to the field of history, which seeks to find the truth in the past, and to admit when events in the past are truly extraordinary.