Stamata Revithi and the 1896 marathon

Who was Stamata Revithi

Stamata (in some sources "Stamatia") Revithi was born in Syros in 1866. By 1896 she was living in deep poverty in Piraeus; at Christmas 1895 she had lost her seven-year-old son, and was raising a second child, 17 months old. Per Olympic historian Athanasios Tarasouleas, she was about thirty years old but looked much older — blond, prematurely wrinkled, with large, expressive eyes.

With no money for a fare, she decided to walk the roughly 9 kilometres from Piraeus to Athens carrying her baby, looking for work. On the way she met a young traveller who, on hearing why she was walking with a child and no ticket, half-jokingly suggested she run the marathon instead — it would make her famous and easier to find work — and gave her some money. From that moment, per Tarasouleas, running the course became her own ambition.

Excluded from the official race

Revithi presented herself to the organizing committee and insisted on being allowed to run. The committee refused, citing a missed registration deadline; Olympic historians David Martin and Roger Gynn note that the real reason was her gender. Per Tarasouleas, the committee instead promised her a race the following Friday alongside a group of American women then in Athens — a race that never actually took place.

She arrived in the village of Marathon on Thursday, 9 April [28 March O.S.], a day before the official race, and quickly became "the famous runner" journalists wanted to meet; Marathon's mayor, Mr Koutsoyannopoulos, gave her lodging. On the morning of Friday, 10 April [29 March O.S.], she asked the old priest of Marathon, Ioannis (Yanni) Veliotis, to say a prayer for her; he replied he would pray in the Church of Saint John, but only for the "official athletes".

Her run, 11 April 1896

On the morning of Saturday, 11 April [30 March O.S.], at 8:00, Revithi set off alone. Before leaving, she had her departure time recorded in a document signed by Marathon's schoolteacher, mayor and magistrate — a detail that shows how deliberately she set out to document her own effort.

She ran, per Tarasouleas, "the entire route at a brisk pace" and arrived, sweating and covered in dust, at "Parapigmata" (a location near today's Evangelismos Hospital) at 13:30 — a time of 5½ hours. The evening before, she had told reporters she expected to need "three and a half hours, perhaps less"; her actual time proved considerably slower than that optimistic estimate.

Stopped short of the stadium

At Parapigmata she found army officers and asked them to sign her handwritten note certifying her arrival time — but she was not allowed to continue on to the Panathenaic Stadium. Per Tarasouleas, when the officers asked why she had put herself through the effort, she answered that she wanted the king to find her child a position, and that she was going straight to Timoleon Philimon, the Olympic Committee's secretary-general, to report her time. She took off her shoes, which were already falling apart, and continued barefoot toward Athens.

Whether she actually met Philimon, or ever submitted her documents to the Olympic Committee, is not known — no such record has been found. No source followed her life beyond that day; no death date is recorded. Tarasouleas has written elsewhere that Revithi "was lost in the dust of history" (Tarasouleas, The Female Spiridon Loues, p.12, per Wikipedia's citation — the phrase does not appear in his 1997 Olympic Review article, this piece's main source, and was not independently verified in this fact-check).

Who was "Melpomene"

Separately from Revithi's story, the French-language Athens press had already referred, earlier that same year, to another — or perhaps the same — woman. On 14 March 1896 [2 March O.S.], the Les Jeux Olympiques supplement of the Messager d'Athènes reported, under the headline "A woman in the Marathon Race", that a woman had enrolled to compete and, in a solo trial run "on Thursday", had covered the "42 kilometres" (the actual 1896 Marathon-to-Athens distance was roughly 40 km) separating Marathon from Athens in 4½ hours, stopping only for ten minutes halfway to eat some oranges.

A few weeks later, Hungarian IOC founding member Franz Kémény wrote in German that "a lady, Miss Melpomene, completed the 40 km marathon in 4½ hours and requested to enter the competition, but the commission did not allow it." The newspaper Akropolis, per Kémény, criticised the decision, noting that no male competitor's participation would ever have been questioned. This is the earliest known appearance of the name "Melpomene" in a written source.

One woman or two? The historians' dispute

In 1994, German Olympic historian Karl Lennartz published "Two Women Ran the Marathon in 1896" in Citius, Altius, Fortius, the journal of the International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH), arguing these were two different women: "Melpomene" ran in early March in 4½ hours and was never admitted to the race; Revithi ran separately, the day after the official race, in 5½ hours. He notes that even Alfréd Hajós, a double Olympic swimming champion in 1896, confirms the name "Melpomene" in his own memoir (1956) — but conflates the timing of the early-March run with the 11 April one, a confusion Lennartz himself flags as an error.

In 1997, in Olympic Review, Greek historian Athanasios Tarasouleas — also an ISOH member — argued the opposite: that no Greek-language press report of the period ever names "Melpomene" — only foreign sources do (per Martin and Gynn, via Wikipedia's citation of their book, the Messager d'Athènes report was not republished in the German Der Leichtathlet until 1927 — a detail that does not appear in Tarasouleas's own article) — while the name "Revithi" appears repeatedly in the Greek press (Akropolis 29 and 31 March, Asty 30 March and 12 April, Estia 23 March, all Old Style dates). Tarasouleas also cites an Estia report (4 April [23 March O.S.]) that calls the same woman "the well-known runner Mrs Revithi" and "the strange woman who ran a trial a few days ago at Marathon". His conclusion: "perhaps Revithi had two names, or perhaps, for reasons unknown, she was attributed the name of the Muse Melpomene."

Later historians Martin and Gynn (2000) side with Tarasouleas, noting that a contemporary reference to Revithi as an already "well-known" runner could by itself explain the earlier reported run — meaning it was Revithi herself, not a separate "Melpomene". Neither side has an undisputable proof: no photograph or official document explicitly links the two names to one person, nor definitively separates them. A popular, later version of the story — that "Melpomene" ran alongside the official race itself and finished hours after Louis — is not supported by the primary sources either historian actually examined, both of which place the "Melpomene"-named run earlier, as a separate trial, not on race day.

Why there is no final answer

The problem is structural, not merely a gap in research: period Greek newspapers never use the name "Melpomene" at all, while the foreign sources (French, German, Hungarian) never give "Melpomene" a surname — only the title "Miss". No surviving source places both women in the same place at the same time.

Nor did the Olympic Committee of the day leave a trail: the documents Revithi said she would submit to Philimon have never been found, nor any committee reply to them. Without those documents, or a new primary source, the identity question remains — as both historians themselves leave it — open.

The legacy: from 1896 to 1984

Whatever the answer to the identity question, the one fact both historians agree is beyond dispute, in Tarasouleas's own words, is that a Greek woman unofficially ran the entire Marathon-to-Athens course in 1896, with no support and despite the organizing committee's explicit refusal. Her effort was never officially recognised, and women would not get their own Olympic marathon for almost a century: not until 1984, in Los Angeles, where American Joan Benoit won the first official women's Olympic marathon in 2:24:52.

Revithi's story stands today as the earliest known chapter of women's participation in the marathon — running alongside, not competing with, the official 1896 story bib2bib has already told in its own article on Spyridon Louis's win.