Between these two marshes, the one on the north, the other on the south, the plain of Marathon is now chiefly covered with corn-fields. But towards its southern end there is a stretch of vineyards mixed with olives and fruit-trees and dotted with a few pines and cypresses. Farther north, an isolated oak-tree rising here and there, and a green belt of currant-plantations stretching from the foot of the hills to the shore of the bay, break the uniformity of the endless corn-fields. The plain is uninhabited. The villages lie at the foot of the mountains or in the neighbouring glens. On a still autumn day, under a lowering sky, the wide expanse of the solitary plain presents a chilling and dreary aspect. Not a living creature is to be seen, except perhaps a few peasants in the distance ploughing with teams of slow-paced oxen.
In this vast sweep of level ground the eye is caught, at no great distance, by a single solitary object rising inconspicuously above it. This is the famous mound, now called Soros, which covers the remains of the Athenians who fell in the battle. It rises from the plain a mile from the foot of the hills, half a mile from the sea, and about three-quarters of a mile north of the marsh of Vrexisa. It is a conical mound of light, reddish mould, some thirty feet high and two hundred paces in circumference. Its top has been somewhat flattened by excavations; its sides are overgrown with low brushwood. A wild pear-tree grows at its foot. In April-June 1890 the mound was excavated under the superintendence of Mr. Staes for the Greek Government. Trenches were cut into it, and at the depth of about nine feet below the present surface of the plain there was found an artificial floor, constructed of sand and other materials, about eighty-five feet long and twenty feet broad. On this floor there rested a layer of ashes, charcoal, and human bones, charred by fire and mouldering away with damp. Mixed with this layer of ashes and bones were about thirty earthenware vases, most of them broken in pieces. These vases are painted in the common black-figured style; the subjects represented are generally chariots, but in some cases horsemen and foot-soldiers. Besides these vases there was found a long-necked amphora adorned with friezes of beasts and monsters in the oriental style, and a winged figure of the oriental Artemis; and another two-handled vase of reddish-brown clay, with decorations somewhat in the Mycenaean style, was found to contain charred bones, perhaps those of a general. Further excavations made in the following year laid bare a sacrificial pit or trench extending diagonally under the mound from north to south. This trench is cased with burnt bricks, and contained ashes, charcoal, and the bones of animals and birds, mixed with fragments of black-figured vases. It had originally been roofed with bricks, which had fallen in. The bones found in this trench are clearly those of the victims sacrificed to the heroic dead before the mound was heaped over their remains; and the broken vases discovered along with them may have been those which were used at the funeral banquet. The Greek archaeologists further detected some vestiges which led them to believe that, even after the mound had been raised, sacrifices continued to be annually offered at it. This confirms Pausanias’s statement that the men who fell in the battle were worshipped as heroes by the people of Marathon. From an inscription we learn that the Athenian lads went to the tomb, laid wreaths on it, and sacrificed to the dead.