The Battle of Marathon in 5th-century Athens. A Journey through the Stratigraphy of Memory

The Persian wars have been widely investigated in Greek history and historiography, as well as in world military history and cultural reception studies. The groundbreaking work by Jung in 2006 inaugurated a new approach to the battles of the Persian wars as lieux de mémoire and focused on their changing cultural commemoration in antiquity. Most recently, the Persian war traditions have been consistently approached through the lens of mnemohistory, which has implicated a more contextualized reading of the ancient evidence and pointed out the changing meaning of each battle in space and time as well as the mnemonic stratification behind the relevant traditions, both within and beyond historiography (Yates 2019; Proietti 2021). Following a mnemohistorical approach, this paper focuses on the battle of Marathon within a relatively limited span of time, and explores how its representation, as well as the historical meanings attached to it, developed and changed throughout the 5th century. By investigating the ancient literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence it pinpoints at least four stages in its multi-layered process of memorialization, responding to four different patterns of commemoration, from its immediate aftermath to the time of the Peloponnesian war.