The plain of Marathon is famously twenty-six miles from Athens (famously because of Pheidippides, the runner who began the first marathon there). In this place between Mount Pentelikon, where pentelic marble comes from, and the Aegean Sea, the traveler may find a remarkable sequence of ancient remains. Together they constitute a sort of history of how the Greeks dealt with death. Of course, one has to use one’s imagination. Most of the things I am going to describe are not spectacular, and though the landscape they inhabit is astonishing, epic, vast, strange, it is no more so than a thousand other Greek landscapes.

On the foothills of the mountain, looking down on the plain and the sea, there is a very ancient cemetery of Helladic people, who buried their dead in little freestone tombs, like tiny houses, and left them with white ornaments of stone in the radically simple Cycladic style. They go back at least 5,000 years. These were folk who knew that the dead remain in the place they loved and worked in, and that the dead are mostly a benevolent presence if they are given proper sacrifices and their resting-places are treated with respect. It is a lovely place of cool breezes, scented with the sweet fennel that grows everywhere among the heather and wild roses. Marathon is the old Greek word for fennel. There is a sense of acceptance of death, not especially mystical, not even very emotional. They were farmers, and life goes on. Although there were surely shrieks of grief at the funeral, they knew wisely that one had to get it out of one’s system and that the land was the richer and more sacred for their bones. There are also apparently burial places nearby from 14,000 years ago that are not much different—and the local Mycenaeans, who succeeded the Helladic people, seem to have practiced the same pattern of ritual, with the same agricultural sense of the cycle of life…