Pheidippides

Right.

And so here we do get, uh, the incursion of the divine into the actions of somebody like, uh, I think Philippides was the...

I'm trying to remember the name of that runner.

It's, it's been a long time.

CHAPTER IV.

INSTANCES OF REMARKABLE AGILITY AND ACUTENESS OF SIGHT it was considered a very great thing for philippides to run one thousand one hundred and sixty stadia the distance between athens and lacedaemon in two days until amistus the lacedaemonian courier and philonidas the courier of alexander the great ran from sicyon to elise in one day a distance of thirteen hundred and five stadia Footnote.

Philippides must have gone one hundred and forty-two miles in two days, and the other one hundred and fifty miles in one day.

End of footnote.

In our own times, too, we are fully aware that there are men in the circus who are able to keep on running for a distance of one hundred and sixty miles, and that lately, in the consulship of Phonteus and Vipstanus, there was a child, eight years of age, who between morning and evening ran a distance of seventy-five miles we become all the more sensible of these wonderful instances of swiftness upon reflecting that tiberius nero when he made all possible haste to reach his brother drusus who was then sick in germany reached him in three stages travelling day and night on the road the distance of each stage was two hundred miles instances of acuteness of sight are to be found stated which indeed exceed all belief cicero informs us that the iliad of homer was written on a piece of parchment so small as to be enclosed in a nutshell footnote this statement must have been in some of his lost works footnote he makes mention also of a man who could distinguish objects at a distance of one hundred and twenty-five miles marcus vero says that the name of this man was strabo and that during the punic war from lilybaeum the promontory of sicily he was in the habit of seeing the fleet come out of the harbor of carthage at a distance of over fifty miles and could even count the number of the vessels callicrates used to carve ants and other small animals in ivory so minute in size that other persons were unable to distinguish their individual parts mermesides also was famous in the same line footnote his works in ivory were said to have been so small that they could scarcely be seen without placing them on a black surface this man made of similar material a chariot drawn by four horses which a fly could cover with its wings, as well as a ship which might be covered by the wings of a tiny bee.