The Battle of Marathon shattered the myth of Persian invincibility, since a Greek army only half the size of the Persian expeditionary force defeated it by carefully choosing the battlefield.

196:28Although the Persian army that Darius sent was  only a relatively small expeditionary force, it had been beaten by a Greek army only half  its size. The Athenians had proven that they could fight by themselves without the aid of  Sparta, and they had shown that by carefully choosing the battlefield, the Persian forces,  previously thought unbeatable, could be overcome. The Greek dead of Marathon were cremated, and their  ashes buried on the battlefield beneath two great

197:05mounds of earth. On the tomb of the Athenians,  the poet Simonides wrote the following epigraph. Fighting at the forefront of the Greeks, the Athenians at Marathon laid  low the army of the gilded Medes. Two days after the battle, Herodotus  describes how 2,000 Spartans arrived on the beach at Marathon and  saw the mounds of the dead. After the full moon, 2,000 Spartans came to  Athens. Although they came too late for the

197:58battle, they desired to see the Persians,  so they went to Marathon and saw them, and they departed again, praising  the Athenians and their achievement. For the Spartans, the fact that Athens  had fought and won without them would be a sore point that would last for at least  the next decade. As for the great King Darius, when news reached him of the defeat  at Marathon, we can only imagine the