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Do you know what those two little letters vs. mean between Greece and Persia in the name of this story?
Perhaps you have seen them used on football tickets when there was to be a match between two teams as, for example, Harvard vs. Yale.
They stand for versus , which means against .
Well, there was to be a great match between Greece and Persia, but it wasn’t a game; it was a fight for life and death, a fight between little Greece and great big Persia.
Cyrus, the great Persian king, had conquered Babylon and other countries, as well, and he had kept on conquering until Persia ruled most of the world, all except Greece and Italy.
About the year 500 B.C. the new ruler of this vast Persian Empire was a man named Darius. Darius looked at the map, as you might do, and saw that he owned and ruled over a large part of it. What a pity, thought he, that there should be a little country like Greece that did not belong to him!
Darius said to himself, “I must have this piece of land called Greece to complete my empire.” Besides, the Greeks had given him some trouble. They had helped some of his subjects to rebel against him. Darius said, “I must punish these Greeks for what they have done and then just add their country to mine.”
He called his son-in-law and told him to go over to Greece and conquer it.
His son-in-law did as he was told and started out with a fleet and an army to do the punishing. But before his fleet could reach Greece it was destroyed by a storm, and he had to go back home without having done anything.
Darius was very angry at this, mad with his son-in-law and mad with the gods who he thought had wrecked his ships, and he made up his mind that he himself would go and do the punishing and conquering the next time.
First, however, he sent his messengers to all the Greek cities and ordered each of them to send him some earth and some water as a sign that they would give him their land and become his subjects peaceably without a fight.
Many Greek cities were so frightened by the threat of Darius and by his mighty power that they gave in at once and sent earth and water as they were told to do.
But little Athens and little Sparta both hotly refused to do so, in spite of the fact that they were only two small cities against the vast empire of Darius.
Athens took Darius’s messenger and threw him into a well, saying, “There is earth and water for you; help yourself”; and Sparta did likewise. Then these two cities joined their forces and called on all their neighbors to join with them to fight for their native land against Darius and Persia.
Darius made ready to conquer Athens and then Sparta.
In order to reach Athens his army had to be carried across the sea in boats. Of course, in those days there were no steamboats. Steamboats were invented nearly two thousand years later.
A trireme
The only way to make a boat go was with sails or with oars. To make a large boat move with oars, it was necessary to have a great many rowers—three rows one above the other on each side of the boat.
Such a boat was called a trireme , which means three rows of oars. It took about 600 of these boats to carry Darius’s army over to Greece. Each of these 600 boats carried, besides the rowers or crew, about 200 soldiers. You can see for yourself how many soldiers Darius had in this army, if there were 600 shiploads of them and 200 soldiers on each ship. Yes, that is an example in multiplication—120,000 soldiers—that’s right.
The Persians sailed across the sea; and this time there was no storm, and they reached the shore of Greece safely. They landed on a spot called the plain of Marathon, which was only about twenty-six miles away from Athens. You will see presently why I have told you just the number of miles—twenty-six.
When the Athenians heard that the Persians were coming, they wanted to get Sparta to help in a hurry, as she had promised to do.
Now, there were no telegraphs or telephones or railroads, of course, in those days. There was no way in which they could send a message to Sparta except to have it carried by hand.
They called on a famous runner named Pheidippides to carry the message. Pheidippides started out and ran the whole way from Athens to Sparta, about one hundred and fifty miles, to carry the message. He ran night and day, hardly stopping at all to rest or to eat, and on the second day he was in Sparta.
The Spartans, however, sent back word that they couldn’t start just then; the moon wasn’t full, and it was bad luck to start when the moon wasn’t full, as nowadays some superstitious people think it bad luck to start on a trip on Friday. They said they would come after a while, when the moon was full.
The Athenians couldn’t wait for the moon. They knew the Persians would be in Athens before then, and they didn’t want them to get as far as that.
So all the fighting men in Athens left their city and went forth to meet the Persians on the plain of Marathon—twenty-six miles away.
The Athenians were led by a man named Miltiades, and there were only ten thousand soldiers. Besides these, there were one thousand more from a little nearby town, which was friendly with Athens and wished to stand by her—eleven thousand in all. If you figure it out, you will see that there were perhaps ten times as many Persians as there were Greeks, ten Persian soldiers to one Greek soldier.
The Greeks, however, were trained athletes, as we know, and their whole manner of life made them physically fit. The Persians were no match for them. In spite of the small number of Greeks, the large number of Persians were beaten, and beaten badly. Of course the Greeks were far better soldiers than the Persians, for all their training made them so, but more than all this, they were fighting for themselves to save their homes and their families.
Perhaps you have heard the fable of the hound who was chasing a hare. The hare escaped. The hound was made fun of for not catching the little hare. To which the hound replied, “I was only running for my supper; the hare was running for his life.”
The Persian soldiers were not fighting for their homes or families, which were away back across the sea; and it made little difference to them who won, anyway, for most were merely hirelings or slaves; they were fighting for a king because he ordered them to.
Naturally the Greeks were overjoyed at this victory.
The first marathon race
Pheidippides, the famous runner, who was now at Marathon, started off at once to carry the joyful news back to Athens, twenty-six miles away. He ran the whole distance without stopping for breath. He had not had time to rest up from his long run to Sparta, which he had taken only a few days before, and so fast did he run this long distance that as soon as he had reached Athens and gasped the news to the Athenians in the market-place he dropped down dead!
In honor of this famous run, they have nowadays in the new Olympic Games, what is called a Marathon race, in which the athletes run this same distance: twenty-six miles. This battle of Marathon took place in 490 B.C. and is one of the most famous battles in all history, for the great Persian army was beaten by one little city and its neighbor, and the Persians had to go back to their homes in disgrace.
A little handful of people, who governed themselves, had defeated a great king with a large army of only hired soldiers or slaves.
But this was not the last the Greeks were to see of the Persians.
