The first recorded account showing a courier running from Marathon to Athens to announce victory is from within Lucian's prose on the first use of the word "joy" as a greeting in A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting. The traditional story relates that Pheidippides, an Athenian herald or hemerodrome, "courier", "professional-running courier" or "day-long runner" ), was sent to Sparta to request help when the Persians landed at Marathon, Greece. He ran about in two days, and then ran back. He then ran the to the battlefield near Marathon and back to Athens to announce the Greek victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon with the word , as stated by Lucianchairete, nikomen and then collapsed and died. Most accounts incorrectly attribute this story to the historian Herodotus, who wrote the history of the Persian Wars in his Histories. However, Magill and Moose suggest that the story is likely a "romantic invention." They point out that Lucian is the only classical source with all the elements of the story known in modern culture as the "Marathon story of Pheidippides": a messenger running from the fields of Marathon to announce victory, then dying on completion of his mission. Robert Browning gave a version of the traditional story in his 1879 poem Pheidippides. This poem inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin and other founders of the modern Olympic Games to invent a running race of 42 km called the marathon. In any case, no such story appears in Herodotus. The relevant passage of Herodotus is: The significance of this story is to be understood in the light of the legend that the godPan returned the favor by fighting with the Athenian troops and against the Persians at Marathon. This was important because Pan, in addition to his other powers, had the capacity to instill an irrational, blind fear that paralyzed the mind and suspended all sense of judgment—panic. Herodotus, writing about 30 to 40 years after the events he describes, did, according to Miller in fact base his version of the battle on eyewitness accounts, so it seems altogether likely that Pheidippides was an actual historical figure, although the same source claims the classical author did not ever, in fact, mention a Marathon-Athens runner in any of his writings. Whether the story is true or not, it has no connection with the Battle of Marathon itself, and Herodotus's silence on the subject of a herald running from Marathon to Athens suggests strongly that no such event occurred. The first known written account of a run from Marathon to Athens occurs in the works of the Greek writer Plutarch, in his essay On the Glory of Athens. Plutarch attributes the run to a herald called either Thersippus or Eukles. Lucian, a century later, credits one "Philippides." It seems likely that in the 500 years between Herodotus's time and Plutarch's, the story of Pheidippides had become muddled with that of the Battle of Marathon, and some fanciful writer had invented the story of the run from Marathon to Athens.
Based on this account, British RAF Wing Commander John Foden and four other RAF officers travelled to Greece in 1982 on an official expedition to test whether it was possible to cover the nearly 250 kilometres in a day and a half. Three runners were successful in completing the distance: John Foden, John Scholtens and John McCarthy. Since 1983, it has been an annual footrace from Athens to Sparta, known as the Spartathlon, celebrating Pheidippides's at least semi-historical run across 246 km of Greek countryside. ;Course records
