Within the mound beneath our feet lies buried with the rest Cynegirus the valiant brother of Æschylus. The poet himself fought in the battle and lived to immortalize his city and himself by his Titanic genius. But in far off Sicily, when his death approached, ignoring his fame as a poet, he turned with eager longing to the distant day and plain of Marathon. To him the battlefield was a consecrated close, an “Alsos” like the Altis of Olympia. Almost as if envying his brother and other companions-in-arms, buried on the battlefield in their native land, he writes as his own epitaph:— “Æschylus, son of Euphorion, here an Athenian lieth, Wheatfields of Gela his tomb waving around and above; Marathon’s glebe-land could tell you the tale of his valour approvèd, Aye and the long-haired Mede knew of it, knew of it well.” The carriage road that leads back to Athens around the southern end of Pentelicus again combines beautiful landscape with historic association. By this road the Persians had thought to move with unimpeded might upon unwalled Athens. Instead, the soldier Eucles[18] (or perhaps Thersippus) brought the swift news to the rejoicing city, followed soon by the Athenian army, who marched from their camp by the Marathonian Heracleum and encamped in the Cynosarges gymnasium, also dedicated to Heracles, south-west of Athens. Here looking down upon the Saronic Gulf they were ready to repel the great host of Persia which was already rounding Sunium. Games in honour of Heracles were celebrated at Marathon, and Euripides, in his “Heracleidæ,” alludes, though vaguely, to the Marathonian tetrapolis as one of the great Attic centres of the worship of Heracles. The Platæans by their presence at Marathon won the lasting and active friendship of Athens, and it was their city that gave the name to the final crushing defeat of the Persians under the combined Greek allies. The Spartans, detained at home by convenient scruples until the full moon gave them the signal to start, arrived at Athens too late for the battle of Marathon, but, as Herodotus charmingly remarks, “they none the less wished to take a look at the Medes and, going out to Marathon, they had a look.” Footnote 18: See chapter xviii, p. 422. This incident, not given by Herodotus, is recorded by Plutarch (_De Gloria Atheniensium_, 3), who says that most authorities give the name of the runner as Eucles but Heracleides Ponticus calls him Thersippus. The soldier, as he tells us, ran the twenty-six miles in full armour and, on reaching the city, with his last breath exclaimed: Χαίρετε καὶ χαίρομεν, “Fare well! we are faring well,” or—the double meaning is elusive—“Greetings! Rejoice, we too are rejoicing!” Browning followed Lucian’s later version, which is apparently a _contaminatio_ with the story of Phidippides, the courier between Sparta and Athens, for which see chapter iii, p. 72.