Battle of Marathon of events, with the competitors running from Marathon to Athens. So popular was this event that it quickly caught on, becoming a fixture at the Olympic games, with major cities staging their own annual events. The distance eventually became fixed at 26 miles 385 yards, or 42.195 km, though for the first years it was variable, being around —the approximate distance from Marathon to Athens. Battle of Marathon The Battle of Marathon (Greek: , "Machē tou Marathōnos") took place in 490 BC, during the first Persian invasion of Greece. It was fought between the citizens of Athens, aided by Plataea,
Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching and Smith reforms, English underwent the Great Vowel Shift, which changed the phonetic values assigned to the English "long vowels", in particular. The same changes affected the English pronunciation of Greek, which thus became further removed from both Ancient Greek and from the Greek that was pronounced in other western countries. A further peculiarity of the English pronunciation of Ancient Greek occurred as a result of the work of Isaac Vossius. He maintained in an anonymously-published treatise that the written accents of Greek did not reflect the original pronunciation. Moreover, Henninus (Heinrich Christian Henning) published "Dissertatio Paradoxa", which claimed that