Ancient tradition holds that after the Battle of Marathon, a runner named Pheidippides sprinted to Athens to deliver news of the Greek victory, gasping the word 'Nike'—victory—before dying of exhaustion. The story, first recorded centuries after the battle, inspired the modern marathon race distance. Historians question its accuracy, since the historian Herodotus, writing closest to the events, never mentions the run at all.
The tale as popularly told comes not from Herodotus, the era's great chronicler of the Persian Wars, but from later writers like Plutarch and Lucian, writing five hundred years or more after the fact. Herodotus does describe a courier named Pheidippides, but sends him on a very different errand: running roughly 150 miles to Sparta to request military aid before the battle, not from the battlefield afterward.
What likely happened, historians suspect, is a conflation of stories: the genuine run to Sparta, and a separate, shorter dash by Athenian hoplites themselves, who marched swiftly back from Marathon to defend Athens against a feared Persian naval flanking maneuver.
Whatever the historical murkiness, the legend proved durable. When the modern Olympics revived in Athens in 1896, organizers created a race from Marathon to the Olympic stadium to commemorate the legendary run, fixing a distance that was later standardized at 26.2 miles for the 1908 London Games—a length determined less by ancient legend than by the location of the British royal box.