A
footrace, one of the contests in the ancient
Olympic Games, featuring
men in full armor running the 600
pou1 length of
Olympia's largest athletic enclosure, or "
stadium".
The stadion became the principal
unit of distance in ancient
Greece; thus we see
Phidippides' fabled
2 run from the plain of
Marathon to
Athens, after the Athenian victory over the
Persians, represented as thirty-five stadia, and
Eratosthenes' lucky estimate of the Earth's circumference given as 250,000 stadia.
In modern times, the length of the stadion is assumed to be the length of the Olympia stadium, about 607 standard feet, or 185
meters.
However, there being no
standards bodies in ancient times, the length of the stadion varied from place to place, and also as time passed. The existence of several different distancees labeled as "
foot" only added to the confusion. Other stadia have lengths of 192.27m, 177.6m, 197.3m, 101.25m, 99.9m or even 82.75m!
Some of these other measurements may have caused
Christopher Columbus to vastly underestimate the length of his
1492 trip to
Japan.
1artabic or Greek feet.
2Probably apocryphal