In 1896, a young man from the outskirts of Athens out-ran seventeen other athletes from Greece, Hungary, Australia, France, and the United States to become the first marathon winner of the modern Olympic Games. After trailing for much of the race, Spyridon Louis (sometimes transliterated as Spiridon Loues) emerged at the head of the pack, running 40 kilometers in all—approximately 25 miles—from the city of Marathon, southward on the eastern coast of Greece, and then westward to Athens, earning a first-place medal for his efforts. His victory won him not only an engraved silver cup, made specially for the occasion, but free coffee and shaves for life, a proposal of marriage, and an eventual Hollywood movie starring Jayne Mansfield.

It was a French national, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who in 1892 first brushed the dust off the legendary Olympic Games as part of his effort to promote the importance of physical education and sport on a global stage. Yet the greatest glory of the first revived competitions belonged to the country where the games originated, Greece. Athens hosted the first set of the modern games, and Louis, a purported water-carrier from the exurbs, dominated the race in spectacular fashion.

The ancient counterpart to Louis was an Athenian messenger named Pheidippides, an expert runner who is said to have run the same course from Marathon to Athens in 490 BCE. Pheidippides wasn’t competing in any race but hurrying to announce the unlikely victory of Greek troops over the invading Persian army in the pivotal Battle of Marathon. Legend tells that Pheidippides reported his good news and promptly fell dead from exhaustion. His athletic feat, combined with the glorious triumph of Greek armies against the massive and wealthy Persian Empire, provides the historical background for the modern marathon, established more than two thousand years later.

The Battle of Marathon was a landmark event in Greek history, coming to embody Hellenic freedom and a unified identity for centuries thereafter. When the battle took place, the Persian forces, led by Darius, King of Kings, had conquered and absorbed large swathes of western Asia and north Africa and were encroaching on northern Greece. With his tremendous army, Darius expected to make quick work of the modest, disunited Greek city-states. Yet despite their smaller numbers, the Greeks won. Under General Miltiades, the Greek soldiers took advantage of their rocky home terrain and their more cohesive fighting style to hem in and drive out the enemy. More than a decade later, as the story goes, the Greeks finally cast the Persians off for good—information provided by Herodotus, considered the first Greek historian.

This specific story about the messenger covering the route from Marathon to Athens, however, doesn’t appear in Herodotus’s writing. In fact, Pheidippides’s run isn’t mentioned by any author at all until more than five hundred years after the Battle of Marathon. Herodotus does, however, refer to Pheidippides in another context: he reports on his journey from Athens to Sparta, a distance of about 150 miles covered over a period of two days. According to Herodotus, Pheidippides ran not to announce victory after the battle, but to ask the Spartans for military support before it got underway. En route, he encountered the rustic deity Pan, who requested better worship from the Athenians. Herodotus makes no mention of a runner dropping dead from exhaustion, instead focusing on the Spartans’ failure to help fight the Persians at Marathon and the subsequent establishment by the Greeks of an annual ritual race—not a marathon—in honor of Pan.

Lucian of Samosata, a Hellenized Syrian writer and satirist, references the legendary post-victory journey from Marathon to Athens in his short second century CE essay, “A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting.” While discussing how to greet people properly—something the author has embarrassingly failed at—Lucian explains that the messenger, here called Philippides, ran to Athens from the battlefield and announced, “Rejoice, we are winning” (xairete, nikomen). Plutarch, writing about a century prior, reports a similar account in his essay, “On the Glory of the Athenians.” Yet Plutarch identifies the messenger as Thersippus or Eucles. In both of these accounts, the messenger punctuates his announcement with a sudden expiration. Plutarch adds further vividness with the detail that the messenger ran the distance “armed with his wounds reeking from the fight.”

If the marathon is based on a spurious anecdote, the Olympic Games themselves grew out of an important ancient reality. These games were a part of Greek life as long ago as the eighth century BCE and continuing into the fourth century CE. Taking place every four years in the town of Olympia in the Peloponnese region, they featured athletic contests but no event covering a distance of more than 26 miles. Instead, they included competitions in boxing, disc throwing, and shorter-distance running—maxing out at no more than three miles. More modest than the modern games, the ancient Olympics brought competitors from all around the Greek empire in a festival celebrating friendly rivalry and athleticism. All Greeks were guaranteed safe passage traveling to or from the contests (though the popular idea that all inter-state hostilities ceased may be a myth).

In the modern period these games were largely forgotten outside of scholarly circles until the nineteenth century’s explosion in archaeological exploration. In the 1870s, the German archaeologist Ernst Curtius excavated the town where the ancient games took place, bringing them to the popular consciousness. Among his discoveries were the location of the original stadium, baths, dining facilities, and altars, as well as a temple of Zeus, the deity in whose honor the games were held.

In mounting Olympic Games in the modern era, Coubertin and his associate Michel Bréal took inspiration from the legend of Pheidippides, for whom Robert Browning named an 1879 poem that popularized the story. Browning merges both messenger tales, with Pheidippides running all the way to Sparta before the Battle of Marathon then back from Marathon to Athens. Moreover, the poet makes Pheidippides into a romantic hero, cut down tragically on the threshold of adulthood. After returning from Sparta, Pheidippides reflects on the reward offered him by Pan, imagining a happy future with a wife and children. Triumphant at Marathon, he is exhorted to make another trip: “To Akropolis! / Run, Pheidippides, one race more!” But his idyllic vision turns tragic when, right after uttering his famous last words, “Rejoice, we conquer,” the narrator tells us, “Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died—the bliss!” In Browning’s telling, the messenger’s valiant run and dying words take on a poignancy that inspired readers, among them the inventors of the modern Olympic Games.

Unlike other features of the modern Olympics, the marathon was invented expressly for the revival. Regardless, Louis’s countrymen held him and his victory up as symbols of ancestral excellence, and a new global tradition was born. At the 1908 games held in London, the distance was settled officially at 26.2 miles, in order to stretch from the stadium to Windsor Castle. In the following decades the marathon has spread far and wide. There are now such courses winding through hundreds of cities and towns around the world every year (including, this week, Philadelphia). Almost a century after the race’s creation, in 1984, women were officially permitted to compete as well, though some records indicate that a Greek woman named Melpomene may have competed alongside Louis in 1896.

In the late nineteenth century, excavations in Greece combined with a social movement promoting physical education and increasing international cooperation fanned excitement over reinstituting the Olympic Games. Amid this Hellenizing enthusiasm, specific historical details, such as the route run by Pheidippides, its exact length, or the spelling of his name, mattered less than the symbolic import of words like “Olympics” and “Marathon.” The invention of the marathon relied on history, legend, and invention in equal parts, both reanimating the past and creating a path for new values to take hold. Now the competitions that once united the fractured city-states of Greece connect people around the globe.

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