Marathon

Certain · the plain and mound

In 490 BCE the Athenians and Plataeans charged at a run across this coastal plain and broke Darius’s army; the burial mound of the 192 dead still rises from it. For the orators and for Plato’s Menexenus the name is shorthand for the city’s finest hour; Herodotus, in this library, tells the battle, the runner, and the epitaphs.