On a September morning in 490 B.C., 9,000 free citizen soldiers from Athens watched the 26,000 Persians, disembarking their ships that were beached beside the plain of Marathon. On the bluffs above, the Athenian general, Militiades, saw that the Persians were not fully prepared. Their archers, who could flood the sky with arrows, were not ready. He therefore commanded his men to run across the open mile of field and to attack. They drove the Persians back into the sea.

Many historians consider the battle of Marathon the most influential in human history, believing it to mark the beginning of the ascendancy of the West over the East. Others maintain that without that battle’s outcome in favor of the Greeks, there may not have been a Western civilization. More »