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Hammond on Marathon: a few notes*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

A. R. Burn
A. R. Burn
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Extract

I am delighted to agree that the Soros as it stands (though now suffering terribly from the feet of tourists and from rain-wash where they have destroyed the grass cover), with its evidence of fifth-century offerings, etc., marks a spot where convenience as well as honour (Hammond 18) caused the Athenians to bury their dead. But it does not necessarily show where the centres of the two armies first clashed. The chief Athenian loss mentioned by Herodotos, in some detail (vi 114), took place in the fighting at the ships. Nevertheless, as it happens, and pace Hammond, my sketch-plan of the battle as I imagine it (PG 244) does not differ from his(ig); except that I think the Persian line is more likely to have been ‘orientated’ to face the Greeks, up the Vrana valley, than exactly parallel to the shore in rear.

Information

Type
Notes
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 89 , November 1969, pp. 118 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1969

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* I am not in general in favour of publishing rejoinders; criticisms are generally best left to the judgment of the informed reader, provided that he has all the relevant information before him. But, I confess, I bridle a little at being accused of impugning the good faith of Staïs in his report on what he found in the Soros, and therewith of joining in a pernicious modern tendency (Hammond in JHS lxxxviii [1968] 23, n. 17). What I recalled to readers' attention (Persia and the Greeks 254 and n.) was that Schliemann in 1884 found enough Mycenaean and other prehistoric fragments, with one Egyptian vase and numerous flints, to convince him that the mound was of earlier origin. Staïs may have thought this evidence unimportant. But Schliemann's earlier sherds must have come from somewhere, and more probably, when the Greeks of 490 were collecting soil for their mound, from burial sites than from among the foundations of a settlement.

I am grateful to the Editor and to Professor A. Andrewes for reading an earlier draft of this paper and suggesting improvements.