Pheidippides: The Greek Who Met A God April 13, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient , trackback
Pheidippides enters the history book because he could run fast and far, and because in 490 BC, with angry Persian immortals just outside their walls, the Athenians decided that they needed help. They looked for assistance in the most violent of all Greek polis, the Spartans to the south. Sparta, though, stood 150 miles from Athens and time was pressing so Pheidippides was tasked with running with a message. Let’s deal with the politics of Pheidippides run straightaway and then get to his divine experience. The text in this post is all from Herodotus:
And first, before they left the city, the generals sent off to Sparta a herald, one Pheidippides, who was by birth an Athenian, and by profession and practice a trained runner… On the occasion of which we speak when Pheidippides was sent by the Athenian generals… he reached Sparta on the very next day after quitting the city of Athens. Upon his arrival he went before the rulers, and said to them: ‘Men of Lacedaemon, the Athenians beseech you to hasten to their aid, and not allow that state, which is the most ancient in all Greece, to be enslaved by the barbarians. Eretria, look you, is already carried away captive; and Greece weakened by the loss of no mean city.’
The Spartans expressed their sympathy with their sometimes enemies the Athenians but had a religious ceremony on and said that they would come in nine days after the full moon, too late for Athens. Poor Pheidippides brought the sad news home with him, not imagining that the Athenians would soon pulp the Persians on their own account. However, let’s move on to the god. According to Herodotus while Pheidippides was on his forty eight hour run (north or south we don’t know) he met a divinity.
[Pheidippides], according to the account which he gave to the Athenians on his return, when he was near Mount Parthenium, above Tegea, fell in with the god Pan, who called him by his name, and bade him ask the Athenians ‘wherefore they neglected him so entirely, when he was kindly disposed towards them, and had often helped them in times past, and would do so again in time to come?’
Now there are a lots of gods in antiquity and lots of interaction with mortals: Zeus is always coming through an open window as a shower of gold to rut with some virgin. But there are far fewer such accounts recorded in reliable accounts from within living memory. Yet Herodotus was writing just sixty years after Pheidippides’ run and there is NO reason for believing that the story was invented and there is lots to recommend it as an ‘experience’. Imagine for a second a grizzled runner, speeding through the countryside of Greece, believing (falsely as it happens) that he is his city’s last hope. The record for this 150 mile run, which usefully has been repeated by twentieth-century athletes, is just over twenty hours. Let’s say that Pheidippides did it in almost double time, thirty five hours, something similar to the results of the first modern runners to undertake the race. (Google Maps claims that you could do it in 46 hours walking!) Tegea is three quarters of the way to Sparta in Arcadia, just the right place to find Pan. Pheidippides will have been running practically non-stop for, say, 24 hours, if we assume that the vision took place on the run south, or about ten hours on the second leg (if he was returning) when he finds himself in this magical part of Greece. Beach likes to think of the vision as happening on the way home: Pheidippides desperate to bring some good news to his countrymen. Physically exhausted, a member of a society where divine experiences were licit, with the sense that the entire universe was focused on him, at least the Athenian universe, in a spiritually suggestive landscape, how could Pheidippides not have seen Pan? The account is absolutely credible and bears comparison with modern individuals in emotional, or tired states encountering fairies, sasquatch and greys. Other thoughts on this vision: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
The Athenians made a great deal of the encounter, perhaps to cloak their disappointment at the Spartans’ tiresome lunar fixation.
The Athenians, entirely believing in the truth of this report, as soon as their affairs were once more in good order, set up a temple to Pan under the Acropolis, and, in return for the message which I have recorded, established in his honour yearly sacrifices and a torch-race.
Did Pan help the Athenians at Marathon itself? Was the story amplified to explain panicking Immortals as the hoplites fought their way into the heart of the Asian army? It is possible. Beach prefers to see the episode, though, in Nietzschean terms. Ancient society was, according to the mustached one, a battle between the orgastic Dionysus (very much a cousin of Pan) and the sublime Apollo. Athens had favoured Apollo in the years before Marathon: and Athen’s golden age, which followed on from Marathon, is the triumph of Apollo and art over the ecstatic and experiential. Pan, a god with much more wisdom, perhaps spoke with more sadness than Pheidippides let on, when they met in the olive grove on the burning road from Sparta…
Bruce T., 30 April 2016, In the early 80’s, I had a friend who got involved in a cross continental bicycle race from Los Angeles to New York. Minimal rest and long days of pedaling. He told me he started hallucinating by the time they hit Illinois and that while completing the race, he wasn’t clear on what was real and wasn’t for the last quarter of the race. His hallucinations were mostly auditory, making him think there were other riders around him when there weren’t and, after a point, making him doubt the reality of the other racers when he was in a pack. He said he wasn’t the only rider to have hallucinations during the race, in fact they seemed to be common as the riders pushed themselves beyond exhaustion. It would be interesting to find out what people involved in ultra-marathons perceive as their races grind on. The presence of Elvis, perhaps?
