“That first, bloody defeat of a previously invincible superpower in 490 BCE [Persia, at Marathon] has never been forgotten in the West. Nor have the battles that followed it – the heroic last stand of the Spartan 300 at Thermopylae, the crucial victories of the Athenians at sea off Salamis and of the Spartans on land at Plataea…. John Stuart Mill claimed ‘the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.’”
A very positive review of Tom Holland’s Persian Fire in Maclean’s December 26 2005 (I did not record the name of the reviewer)