Pheidippides
Pheidippides
The Athenian hēmerodromos — day-runner, a professional long-distance courier — whom the generals sent to Sparta before the battle to ask for reinforcements. He covered the ~240 km from Athens to Sparta in about two days, and on the return leg, Herodotus says, the god Pan appeared to him above Mount Parthenion and asked why the Athenians neglected his cult — the origin of the Athenian shrine to Pan on the north slope of the Acropolis. The Spartans delayed at the Karneia festival and arrived after the battle was over. The familiar legend of a run from Marathon to Athens bearing the news of victory, and dying on arrival, is a conflation of Pheidippides's Spartan run with a separate later story: Plutarch names the Marathon-to-Athens runner Eukles or Thersippus, and Lucian is the first to attach Pheidippides's name to that second run. Herodotus knows only the Sparta run.