Give me the Herodotus account.

 

Herodotus on Pheidippides

The relevant passage is in Histories, Book 6, chapters 105–106, in his account of the lead-up to the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE.

What Herodotus Actually Says

When the Persian fleet landed at Marathon, the Athenian generals — knowing they were heavily outnumbered — sent a herald to Sparta to request military assistance. The herald was Pheidippides (some manuscripts give "Philippides," and modern scholarship tends to prefer that spelling, though Pheidippides is the form that has stuck in popular memory). Herodotus describes him as a hēmerodromos — a "day-runner," a professional long-distance courier of the kind Greek city-states employed for urgent communication.

He ran from Athens to Sparta. Herodotus says he arrived the day after he set out. The distance is roughly 240 km (150 miles) across mountainous terrain. This is the run that the modern ultramarathon called the Spartathlon now retraces — and which contemporary athletes do complete in around 24–36 hours, lending the account real plausibility.

The Encounter with Pan

The most striking element of the passage — and the part later writers tended to drop — is what happened during the run, not at the end of it. Pheidippides told the Athenians on his return that as he was crossing Mount Parthenion, above Tegea, the god Pan called out to him by name. Pan asked why the Athenians paid him no attention, given that he was well-disposed toward them and had often been useful, and would be again. The Athenians, Herodotus reports, believed the story once their affairs were settled, and established a shrine to Pan beneath the Acropolis, honouring him from that time on with annual sacrifices and a torch-race.

Herodotus does not vouch for the divine encounter — he reports what Pheidippides said and what the Athenians made of it. But the way he tells it makes Pheidippides a living messenger who returned to Athens, reported, was believed, and whose testimony shaped Athenian religious practice afterward.

The Spartan Response

The Spartans were willing to help but said they could not march until the moon was full — they were observing the festival of the Karneia, during which military expeditions were forbidden. By the time they did march, the battle had been fought and won. Herodotus says 2,000 Spartans arrived after the fact, viewed the Persian dead on the field, congratulated the Athenians, and went home.

What Herodotus Does Not Say

Herodotus says nothing about anyone running from Marathon to Athens to announce victory. He does mention, separately, that after the battle the Athenian army marched back to Athens at speed to defend the city against the Persian fleet, which was sailing around Cape Sounion to attack from the south. The army made it back in time and the Persians withdrew. But this is an army's forced march, not a single herald's run, and no one dies of it.

The Later Confusion

The dying-herald story emerges much later. Plutarch, writing around 100 CE — nearly 600 years after the battle — mentions in On the Glory of Athens a runner named variously Thersippus or Eukles who ran from Marathon to Athens and died announcing the victory. Lucian, in the second century CE, conflates this figure with Pheidippides and gives him the famous last word nenikēkamen ("we have won"). The composite is what entered European literary memory and, through Robert Browning's 1879 poem "Pheidippides," shaped the modern Olympic event.

So the irony is considerable: the marathon as a race commemorates a run Herodotus does not describe, performed by a man Herodotus does describe doing something else entirely — and doing it successfully, with a god's encouragement, and surviving.