Марафондық жарысқа бастау: 490 жылғы грек елшісі Феидиппид

490 BC Greek runner from Marathon to Athens

Pheidippides (, , ; "Son of Pheídippos") or Philippides (Φιλιππίδης) is the central figure in the story that inspired two modern sporting events, the marathon race and the Spartathlon. Pheidippides is said to have run from Marathon to Athens to deliver news of the victory of the battle of Marathon.

The name Philippides is reported by Pausanias, Plutarch, and Lucian, writers who had read this name in their versions of Herodotus, while in most of Herodotus' manuscripts the form appears Pheidippides. Other than Herodotus' manuscripts, the form Pheidippides is only attested in Aristophanes' The Clouds (423 BC). Many historians argue that Aristophanes willfully distorted the real name so as not to use the name of the hero of Marathon in his play, or as a play on words meaning “save horses”. However, given that the name Pheidippo is attested in the Iliad, the existence of a Pheidippides cannot be excluded, but according to many this form remains an error of the copyists of the manuscripts.

The traditional story relates that Pheidippides (530–490 BC), an Athenian herald, or hemerodrome "courier", "professional running courier" "We win! "), as stated by Lucian chairete, nikomen ("hail, we are the winners") and then collapsed and died. 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 (2nd century AD). Most accounts incorrectly attribute this story to the historian Herodotus, who wrote the history of the Persian Wars in his Histories (composed about 440 BC). However, Magill and Moose (2003) 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". (Mention of a "fennel field" is a reference to the Greek word for fennel, marathon, the origin of the name of the battlefield.) This poem inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin and other founders of the modern Olympic Games to invent a running race of approximately 40 km (25 miles) called the marathon. In 1921, the length of marathons became standardized at 42.195 km (26 miles, 385 yards). In any case, no such story appears in Herodotus. The relevant passage of Herodotus is:
quotation|Before they left the city, the Athenian generals sent off a message to Sparta. The messenger was an Athenian named Pheidippides, a professional long distance runner. According to the account he gave the Athenians on his return, Pheidippides met the god Pan on Mount Parthenium, above Tegea. Pan, he said, called him by name and told him to ask the Athenians why they paid him no attention, in spite of his friendliness towards them and the fact that he had often been useful to them in the past, and would be so again in the future. The Athenians believed Pheidippides's story, and when their affairs were once more in a prosperous state, they built a shrine to Pan under the Acropolis, and from the time his message was received they held an annual ceremony, with a torch race and sacrifices, to court his protection. On the occasion of which I speak – when Pheidippides, that is, was sent on his mission by the Athenian commanders and said that he saw Pan – he reached Sparta the day after he left Athens and delivered his message to the Spartan government. "Men of Sparta" (the message ran), "the Athenians ask you to help them, and not to stand by while the most ancient city of Greece is crushed and subdued by a foreign invader; for even now Eretria has been enslaved, and Greece is the weaker by the loss of one fine city." The Spartans, though moved by the appeal, and willing to send help to Athens, were unable to send it promptly because they did not wish to break their law. It was the ninth day of the month, and they said they could not take the field until the moon was full. So they waited for the full moon, and meanwhile Hippias, the son of Pisistratus, guided the Persians to Marathon. nowrap| — Herodotus so it seems altogether likely that Pheidippides was an actual historical figure according to most historians. Miller also asserts that Herodotus did not ever, in fact, mention a Marathon to 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 evidently dramatic incident 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 (46–120 AD), 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 (in particular with the story of the Athenian forces making the march from Marathon to Athens in order to intercept the Persian ships headed there), and some fanciful writer had invented the story of the run from Marathon to Athens.