BATTLE OF MARATHON

outline-the-causes-of-the-battle-of-marathon-evaluate-the-historical-significance-of-the-attack-on-athens-at-marathon-in-490bc52

Please be advised, Mr Hendry, that the posted document is a fixed up version on today’s assessment. This document has additonal information coinciding with the essay question and grammatical errors fixed. This post is different to today’s handed up assessment because you had told us that we can fix it up until today, that is, before 12am of Friday. Errors were evident in essay, such as grammar, stence structure, etc and therefore was fixed.

MARATHON

PROGRESS REPORT #1

battle-of-marathon 

PROGRESS REPORT #2

battle1

PROGRESS REPORT

A reconstruction of beached Persian ships at Marathon prior to the battle.

The initial positions of the troops before the clash. The Greeks (blue) have pulled up their wings to bolster the corners of their significantly smaller centre in a ]] shape. The Persian fleet (red) waits some way off to the east. This great distance to the ships played a crucial role in the later stages of the battle.

 

The Greek wings (blue) envelop the Persian wings (red) while their strategically-thinned centre filled the gap made between them.

Modern drawing of a phalanx. The hoplites, with the exception of the Spartans, were not actually as uniformly equipped as depicted because each soldier would buy his own arms and decorate them at his discretion.

QUESTION                                                                                                                                                   

Outline the causes for the Battle of Marathon. Evaluate the historical significance for the attack on Athens at Marathon in 490BC.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION                                                                                                                  

Why Did I Choose This As A Historical Investigation?                                                                                       

MAIN FOCUS (GOALS) FOR HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION

PROBLEMS OR ISSUES

ESSAY PLAN

LENGTH

SOURCES

http://boards.historychannel.com/thread.jspa?threadID=100009096&messageID=300418309

http://raf.heavengames.com/history/civilization/greek/page4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A10083395

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon#Conclusion

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/marathon.htm

http://www.thenagain.info/Classes/Sources/Herodotus-Marathon.html

http://www.essortment.com/all/thebattleofma_rwnl.htm

http://joseph_berrigan.tripod.com/ancientbabylon/id27.html

http://www.historynet.com/battle-of-marathon-greeks-versus-the-persians.htm/2#high_4

 

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/244231/ancient-Greece/26497/The-Battle-of-Marathon#tab=active~checked%2Citems~checked&title=ancient%20Greek%20civilization%20%3A%3A%20The%20Battle%20of%20Marathon%20–%20Britannica%20Online%20Encyclopedia

 

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/histn/histn021.pdf

 

http://www.heritage-history.com/www/heritage.php?Dir=eras&FileName=greece_4.php

 

http://unitedcats.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/the-battle-of-marathon/

 

http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/History/hakhamaneshian/marathon.htm

 

 

BATTLE OF MARATHON

FINAL QUESTION

Outline the causes for the Battle of Marathon. Evaluate the historical significance for the Battle of Marathon.

SECOND QUESTION

Assess the legends associated with the Battle of Marathon. 

Sources:

Athens was not entirely alone in its fight against the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 bc. Plataea fought beside Athens, true to the alliance of 519, and the Tomb of the Plataeans, excavated in 1966, probably commemorates the place where they fell. Eretria, which had also sent help to the Ionian revolt, had already been pounced on and destroyed. The reasons for the Persian choice of Marathon, as given by Herodotus, were proximity to Eretria (that is, the Persians wanted a short line of communications) and the good cavalry terrain there. He does not add, however, that a third powerful motive was political. The deposed Peisistratid tyrant Hippias, now a bitter old man, accompanied the Persian forces. (The Peisistratids came originally from eastern Attica.) Cleisthenes, in implementing his democratic reforms after the fall of the tyrants, had perhaps tried to break up old sources of political influence in this region. For instance, Rhamnus, a little to the north of Marathon and a vital coastal garrison site in Classical and Hellenistic times, seems to have been anomalously attributed to a city trittys; and an ancient local organization known as the Marathonian “Four Cities,” or Tetrapolis, was broken up among more than one of the new tribes. Reasonably or unreasonably, Hippias was obviously hoping to establish a kind of political bridgehead here by appealing to old bonds of clientship.

The Athenians, however, marched out immediately under Miltiades, who had been recalled a year or two earlier from the Chersonese to help Athens meet the danger. Then, perhaps when the Persian cavalry was temporarily absent, they attacked the Persians “at a run.” This last detail impressed itself on the tradition, as it undoubtedly impressed the waiting Persians, and the discovery of Persian arrowheads in the Athenian burial mound makes it possible to supply the explanation that had eluded Herodotus. The Athenian advance was evidently achieved under a hail of arrows; and the quicker the dangerous ground was covered, the better.

The Athenian victory was overwhelming; there were 6,400 Persian casualties to 192 Athenian. It was an important victory for two reasons. First, it showed what lethal damage hoplites could do to Persian forces; this encouraging message was not missed by the Spartans who arrived to view the corpses and departed with patronizing congratulations to the Athenians. Second and more important, it was a propaganda victory, celebrated in all the available media. Marathon soon became an almost mythical event. The Athenian Treasury at Delphi was built out of the spoils of the battle. An ambitious conjecture seeks to equate the 192 Marathon dead with the 192 equestrian figures on the Parthenon frieze. The horses on the frieze would be a difficulty if the idea was to recall the battle in a literal way, because the battle was definitely not a cavalry affair; but it has been ingeniously suggested that the horses were intended to suggest “heroic” status in the technical sense of “hero,” or demigod. Heroic cult often involved horses (as perhaps at Lefkandi), and heroic funerals regularly included equestrian events. This interpretation, however, poses problems for two reasons: the frieze was partially destroyed in the 17th century and reconstruction depends on old drawings, and the evidence for actual heroization of the Marathonian dead is late. Other, though not necessarily incompatible, interpretations of the Parthenon frieze are available: perhaps it represents the mythical daughters of Erechtheus, who saved the city by sacrificing themselves, a favourite and familiar theme in Athenian myth.

Still, there is no doubting the symbolic significance of Marathon, or the way in which well after the Persian Wars the victory was exploited in epigram and painting. For instance, there was a famous rendition of the Battle of Marathon in the “Painted Colonnade” at Athens (now lost), which was perhaps commissioned by Miltiades’ son Cimon. This was celebratory artistic propaganda, with a far clearer message than that of the Peisitratids. The Battle of Marathon and the Persian Wars must be recognized as an artistic watershed. There was admittedly something splendid about the gesture of sending help to the Ionian revolt, and it has been suggested accordingly that early 5th-century depictions on vases of Theseus attacking the Amazons (inhabitants of Anatolia) may be a coded allusion to Athens’ Asiatic adventure of the 490s. The vindictive Athenian treatment of the playwright Phrynichus for referring in a play to the fall of Athens’ daughter city Miletus shows, however, that the Ionian revolt was a dangerous subject, not lightly to be treated by pot painters. Marathon was the beginning of an epoch that lasted for centuries, during which Athens asserted its claim to uniqueness on the basis of two things: its achievements in the Persian Wars and (in and after the 4th century) its cultural primacy.

Meanwhile the Persians retreated, and Darius died, to be succeeded in 486 by Xerxes. No Greek could have doubted that Marathon, for all its symbolic importance, was not the end of the matter and that Xerxes would return with a much larger invasion force.

http://boards.historychannel.com/thread.jspa?threadID=100009096&messageID=300418309

http://raf.heavengames.com/history/civilization/greek/page4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A10083395

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon#Conclusion

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/marathon.htm

http://www.thenagain.info/Classes/Sources/Herodotus-Marathon.html

http://www.essortment.com/all/thebattleofma_rwnl.htm

http://joseph_berrigan.tripod.com/ancientbabylon/id27.html

http://www.historynet.com/battle-of-marathon-greeks-versus-the-persians.htm/2#high_4

 

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/244231/ancient-Greece/26497/The-Battle-of-Marathon#tab=active~checked%2Citems~checked&title=ancient%20Greek%20civilization%20%3A%3A%20The%20Battle%20of%20Marathon%20–%20Britannica%20Online%20Encyclopedia

 

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/histn/histn021.pdf

 

http://www.heritage-history.com/www/heritage.php?Dir=eras&FileName=greece_4.php

 

http://unitedcats.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/the-battle-of-marathon/

 

http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/History/hakhamaneshian/marathon.htm

 

LATIN TERMS

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THE CITY OF ROME IN THE LATE REPUBLIC

the-city-of-rome-in-the-late-republic2

THE SIEGE OF MASADA

reconstruction-of-an-event.doc

MASADA

masada.doc

PRESERVATION AND DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE

the-preservation-and-destruction-of-evidence.doc

PARTHENON MARBLES BATTLE

1. The Parthenon was built in honour of which ancient Greek goddess?

The Parthenon was built in honour to the Greek goddess Athena.

 

2. Where on the Parthenon is the marble frieze located?

On the Parthenon the marble frieze is located at the band of the Parthenon above the columns.

 

3. When and how did the Parthenon come to lie in ruins?

In 1687, it was blown up during a war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire which was then occupying Greece.

 

4. Who was Lord Elgin and what did he do with sections of the frieze?

Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire received what he construed as permission to remove the marble friezes and take them home to England.

 

5. Why do some claim Elgin was the ‘vandal’?

To his detractors, Lord Elgin himself was the ‘vandal’. He cut up the frieze into sections so they can be shipped more easily to England.

 

6. Why does the British Museum (BM) claim title to the frieze?

The British Museum has legal title to the marbles. moreover, it has a mission as a museum of all world cultures. The British Museum can unqiuely provide is an opportunity to see the Parthenon sculptures in context to civilizations that flourished around the times of ancient Greece.

 

7. How much of the original frieze still stands in Athens?

Approximately, 50% of the original frieze that survived today and of that 50% about of that are in London and the other half in Athens.

 

8. What is the opinion of Greeh archaeologists on the matter?

The frieze itself depicts an important Athenian religious procession. They believe all the surviving pieces should be exhibited together because seen together they have a narrative. it is not correct for pieces so important to have fragments in different places and not placed together to the original building.

 

9. How does the BM suggest they could resolve the ‘complicated situation’?

They intend to fill in the gaps of the Athenian frieze with copies of the British museum’s frieze so the visitors can have a more complete vision of the procession that’s depicted. on the basis of an exchange, or for a friendly co-operation would be possible to get back the absolute pattern. The trustee’s fund of a loans policy for Greece could take place.

 

10. What is your stance on returning the frieze to Athens? Do you agree that it should remain permanently in the BM except for loan periods?

I believe that teh British should return the frieze to Athens because it has a strong historical legacy built for the Greek goddess Athena. It is not right that the British should keep the frieze because the frieze itself orginated from Athens. It is of great importance for Greece. I disagree with the fact that it should remain permanently in the BM except for loan periods because what is it to money then to have something of great importance for Greece.