The Immortals

Of all the units of the Achaemenid army, one has seized the modern imagination above the rest: the royal guard the Greeks called the Immortals, ten thousand chosen Persian foot, kept forever at full strength, marching in gold beside the King of Kings. The name is unforgettable, and it is a trap. It is a Greek name, coined or transmitted by Herodotus, for an institution whose own records are almost silent; and around it has gathered a body of confident modern statement, about the corps' Persian name, its equipment, and its supposed portrait on the walls of Susa, that the sources will not actually bear. This entry tries to separate the Persian institution, a real and important thing, from the Greek image and the modern embroidery, and to be honest about how much of the familiar picture rests on the single word of one Greek writer. The general survey of the forces is given under warfare and the army; here the guard itself is the subject.

A Greek name: athanatoi

"Immortals" translates the Greek athanatoi, and the word is Herodotus'. He applies it to the corps three times, all in the narrative of Xerxes' invasion of Greece in 480 to 479 (7.83, 7.211, 8.113), and every later ancient writer who uses the term, Athenaeus quoting Heracleides of Cumae, Hesychius, Procopius and the rest, is drawing on Herodotus rather than on any independent Persian source (Schmitt).^[1] There is no attested Old Persian, Elamite or Babylonian word that we can set behind the Greek. The names of the smaller units of the army do seem to survive in the Persepolis tablets, an Elamite form for a unit of ten, another for a unit of a hundred, but for the great regiment of ten thousand no native name is known, and the corps' own Iranian designation, in Schmitt's flat judgement, "cannot be solved, because authentic sources are missing."^[1] The Immortals are, in the most literal sense, a Greek name for a Persian thing.

The etymology: a modern conjecture, not a fact

A single explanation of that Greek name has escaped the scholarship and entered popular writing as though it were established: that "Immortals" is a mistranslation, that Herodotus or his informant heard an Old Persian anūšiya, "follower, companion", and, misled by its likeness to an Old Iranian \anauša (Avestan anaoša-), "immortal", rendered it athanatoi*. It is worth stating plainly that this is a hypothesis, and a contested one, not a solved etymology.

The conjecture is not baseless, and it has a definite author. It was put forward by Antonino Pagliaro, first briefly in 1943 and then in detail in 1954, exactly in the terms just given: a confusion of anūšiya- "follower" with \anauša "immortal".^[1] But Schmitt, whose is the authoritative reference treatment (the Encyclopaedia Iranica article "Immortals"), records "weighty reservations" against it. Two tell most. First, Herodotus' transferred use of athanatos, "immortal", for human beings rather than for gods is not natural Greek, so it does not read like a translator reaching for the obvious word. Second, the ordinary sense of Old Persian anūšiya-, "follower", is hard to reconcile with the name of a body of one or ten thousand men; Gherardo Gnoli, who studied the question at length, raised just this difficulty.^[2] Gnoli preferred to keep the idea of immortality itself, reading it not as a philologist's blunder but as a genuine reflex of a notion "characteristic of a military society", the guard imagined as undying because the corps never died.^[2] Others again have tried to recover a positive Old Persian name, reconstructing \Amrtaka, "immortal", to lie behind the Greek (Sekunda); Schmitt calls this, like the parallel reconstruction of a word for the ten-thousand-strong division itself, "mere speculation."^[1]

The safe position, then, is the modest one. Athanatoi is Herodotus' word; its exact Old Persian original is unknown; the popular "mistranslation of anūšiya" story is one modern conjecture (Pagliaro's) among several, weighed down with objections, and should never be asserted as settled fact. What the sources do let us describe with some confidence is not the name but the thing.

Herodotus' definition: the standing Ten Thousand

The institution behind the name is a standing corps held permanently at a fixed establishment, and it is Herodotus who both names it and, in the same breath, explains why:

"These were generals of the whole together that went on foot, excepting the ten thousand; and of these ten thousand chosen Persians the general was Hydarnes the son of Hydarnes; and these Persians were called 'Immortals,' because, if any one of them made the number incomplete, being overcome either by death or disease, another man was chosen to his place, and they were never either more or fewer than ten thousand." (Herodotus 7.83, trans. Macaulay)^[3]

The defining feature is the constant replacement, and it points to something real: a professional force kept always at strength, the year round, in contrast to the seasonal levy that gathered around it only for a great campaign and then dispersed. This is the point on which the modern specialist reading and the ancient source agree. On the reconstruction associated with Nicholas Sekunda, the corps was "the primary regiment of 10,000 Persian infantry, a standing force... made up of professional soldiers and always maintained at full strength", where the other decimal regiments would dwindle over time until they were mustered out (as summarised in the Companion's chapter on army structure).^[4] The commander Herodotus names, Hydarnes son of Hydarnes, is plausibly the son of the Hydarnes who was one of the Seven conspirators of 522 and later satrap of Media (Briant).^[5] That the corps had a single named commander, set apart from the six marshals of the rest of the infantry, is itself a mark of its standing character.

Herodotus adds, in the same chapter, that the Persians of this body were the best-equipped and most gold-laden men in the army, travelling with covered carriages for their concubines and attendants and with their own provisions carried apart on camels. Whether all that luxury attached specifically to the Immortals or to the native Persian contingent more broadly is, as Schmitt notes, not actually clear from Herodotus' words, a small but characteristic instance of how much the familiar picture reads into a source that is vaguer than its confident retellings.^[1]

The apple-bearers: the inner thousand

Within, or beside, the ten thousand stood a smaller and still more select body: a thousand spearmen of the noblest Persians, distinguished by the ornaments on the butts of their spears, who served as the king's immediate bodyguard. Herodotus describes them in the great set-piece of the army's march out of Sardis, without ever using the word athanatoi, so that the relation between this passage and his "Immortals" is something the reader must reconstruct:

"And after the horsemen ten thousand men chosen out from the remainder of the Persians. This body went on foot; and of these a thousand had upon their spears pomegranates of gold instead of the spikes at the butt-end, and these enclosed the others round, while the remaining nine thousand were within these and had silver pomegranates. And those also had golden pomegranates who had their spear-points turned towards the earth, while those who followed next after Xerxes had golden apples." (Herodotus 7.41, trans. Macaulay)^[6]

It is from the golden apples of this passage, and from later writers who make them a named unit, that the guard's other famous title comes. Heracleides of Cumae, quoted by Athenaeus, calls them mēlophoroi, "apple-bearers", and states their relation to the larger corps precisely: they "were Persians by birth, having on the butt of their spears golden apples, and numbering a thousand, selected because of their rank (aristinden) from the 10,000 Persians who are called the Immortals."^[7] On this account the apple-bearers are an inner elite of one thousand, chosen by birth out of the ten thousand, and they, not the whole corps, are the bodyguard proper, permanently attached to the king's person. Briant draws the strands together: the mēlophoroi guarded the king during audiences, had a part of the palace reserved for them, were "accustomed to take care of the royal robes", and were commanded by the chiliarch, the "commander of a thousand" who doubled as the great court officer controlling access to the King.^[5] It is a telling detail that Darius I himself, before he was king, is said to have served as a spear-bearer (doryphoros) to Cambyses (Herodotus 3.139): the guard was the school and the proving-ground of the Persian nobility.

Modern scholarship has laboured, with only partial success, to keep these overlapping bodies distinct: the ten thousand "Immortals" of Herodotus 7.83; the thousand spear-bearers with golden pomegranates who "enclosed the others" in 7.41; and the innermost thousand with golden apples nearest Xerxes, the later "apple-bearers." The Greek terminology is not consistent, the numbers overlap, and, as Schmitt warns, "not every corps of 10,000 elite soldiers mentioned by some Greek author must be identified with the Immortals without hesitation."^[1] The one Old Persian guard-title we can actually attach to a word is ṛštibara-, "spear-bearer", the native term the Greeks rendered as doryphoros and, for the apple-bearing inner corps, mēlophoros.^[8]

Origin, command and the decimal frame

Where the guard came from, the Persian record does not say. The one origin-story we have is again Greek, and idealising: Xenophon, in the Cyropaedia, makes Cyrus the Great the founder, creating a body of ten thousand spear-bearers (doryphoroi) recruited from the common Persians to guard the palace day and night and to march drawn up on either side of him when he moved abroad (Cyr. 7.5.66 to 68).^[5] Xenophon's Cyrus is a work of political pedagogy rather than history (see Xenophon), and this cannot be taken as a documentary account of the guard's foundation; but it does show that a Greek observer of the fourth-century court understood the royal guard as a standing body of about ten thousand, which fits Herodotus and the later evidence well enough.

The corps sat, in the Greek accounts, at the head of a decimal army: files of ten, hundreds, thousands under a hazārapati ("commander of a thousand", the word that survives in Greek as chiliarchos), and the ten-thousand-strong regiment itself. Herodotus describes exactly this ladder (7.81), and the survival of the reconstructed command-titles in the administrative tablets gives it some support. But here too caution is due. As Sean Manning stresses in the standard modern monograph, no ancient text actually attests a word for a "group of ten thousand" or its commander; the terms \baivarabam and \baivarapati- are modern reconstructions built to complete the series, and the whole tidy decimal scheme is known only from Greek sources bound up with the rhetoric of the countless enemy host.^[9] The Immortals stand at the top of a structure that is better attested in its lower rungs than its upper ones.

Equipment and the shield-wall: the debated adequacy

The Persian guardsman's arms were those of the Persian infantry at large, and their adequacy has been argued over for a century. He carried the composite bow, the national weapon; the akinakes, the short two-edged dagger-sword at the thigh; and above all the spear. Herodotus (7.61) describes the Persian foot in scale corselets "which looked like fish", soft felt caps, and, instead of round metal shields, large oblong wickerwork ones. That wicker shield, the gerron, is the key to the formation: planted in the ground, a rank of them made a standing wall from behind which the archers shot, the arrangement modern writers call the sparabara ("shield-bearer") shield-wall, though the Old Persian term is a scholarly reconstruction (\spara-bara*) rather than a securely attested word.

The Greek tradition worked hard to make the Persian an archer and the free Greek a spearman, and to make the Persian's arms inferior, above all his spear, which Herodotus repeatedly calls "shorter" than the Greek. Two cautions from the current scholarship apply directly to the guard. First, the "short spear" is very likely a rhetorical cliché rather than a technical observation: Manning shows that Herodotus applies the same phrase to the Bactrians, the Colchians and others, and puts it in the mouth of Aristagoras haranguing the Spartans, and that contemporary art does not support it, spears both Greek and Persian running from roughly the height of the bearer to a third longer. "There is no basis," Manning concludes, "for describing the other Persian weapons as inferior" either.^[9] Second, Herodotus himself lets slip that the scale armour was not universal: when he divides the Persians after Salamis into the Immortals, the "cuirass-bearers" and others (8.113), he shows that body armour marked out some soldiers and not others, exactly as in a Greek army.^[9] The picture of a splendid but under-armed guard, brave and gaudy but out-classed by hard Greek iron, is in large part a Greek moral construction, and the compendium's survey treats it as such.

Thermopylae: the guard in action, and its limits

The Immortals owe their fame above all to a defeat. At Thermopylae in 480, when the Median and Cissian assaults on the pass had failed, Xerxes committed the guard, under that same Hydarnes, and it fared no better. Herodotus fixes the reason in the ground and the weapons, not in any failure of nerve:

"...when the Medes were being roughly handled, then these retired from the battle, and the Persians, those namely whom the king called 'Immortals,' of whom Hydarnes was commander, took their place and came to the attack, supposing that they at least would easily overcome the enemy. When however these also engaged in combat with the Hellenes, they gained no more success than the Median troops but the same as they, seeing that they were fighting in a place with a narrow passage, using shorter spears than the Hellenes, and not being able to take advantage of their superior numbers." (Herodotus 7.211, trans. Macaulay)^[10]

There is nothing here to surprise. A chokepoint neutralises numbers by design; the finest infantry in the world, fed piecemeal into a narrow gap against braced hoplites, will be checked until the position is turned, as it duly was, by the same Hydarnes leading a night march over the mountain path. It is worth adding, with the recent scholarship, that Herodotus' "shorter spears" in this very sentence is again the cliché, embedded in a passage whose real subject is the contrast of soft numbers and hard manhood; the modern reader should register the rhetoric and not take the tactical claim at face value.^[9] The decisive flanking stroke, moreover, is unlikely to have used the whole ten thousand: the topography of the Anopaia path argues for a picked detachment of perhaps a couple of thousand, which is exactly what elite troops are for.

The vanishing corps, and the later kings

One of the more awkward facts about the Immortals is how quickly they leave the story. After Thermopylae they all but disappear from the battle narratives. Herodotus reports that when Xerxes withdrew after Salamis, Mardonius "chose first all those Persians who are called 'Immortals,' except only their commander Hydarnes" for the army that would fight at Plataea in 479 (8.113); yet in the actual account of that campaign the Immortals are never mentioned again, which led even Herodotus' commentators to suspect that the corps in fact went home with the king as his bodyguard and that this notice is simply mistaken (Schmitt, following Hignett).^[1] The name resurfaces a century and a half later in the historians of Alexander's wars: Curtius Rufus lists "the Immortals" in Darius III's march to Issus, and Arrian and Diodorus place the "apple-bearers" (mēlophoroi) as a royal bodyguard beside Darius at Gaugamela.^[4] But the mention of the Immortals in the Alexander narratives may be no more than a learned echo of Herodotus, since the corps does no fighting under that name; the apple-bearers, by contrast, are a live presence around the last Great King, guarding him in the battle-line and surrounding him in the retreat. The institution of the royal guard clearly ran the length of the dynasty; the specific label "Immortals" is best regarded as a Herodotean coinage that later writers reached for, rather than as a continuously documented Persian unit.

The "Immortals" of Susa: a modern label

No image of the guard is more familiar than the frieze of striding, spear-bearing archers in patterned robes, worked in polychrome glazed brick, that once lined a doorway of the palace at Susa and now stands in the Louvre. It is reproduced everywhere as "the Immortals", and the identification should be handled with care, because it is a modern label and not a secure one. The bricks themselves carry no inscription naming the figures. The equation of these Susa guards (and of the comparable stone guardsmen carved on the stairways of Persepolis) with Herodotus' ten thousand is, as Schmitt puts it, "far from being proven, in spite of their Persian clothing at Susa", and it depends, like so much else, ultimately on Herodotus: it is only because a Greek text describes a splendid guard that scholars have read these splendid guardsmen as that corps.^[1] Kuhrt, cataloguing the same panel, calls the figures simply "the Susa Guards", and Manning notes that the identification of the reliefs at Persepolis and Susa as "Immortals" "also depends on Herodotus, since other classical sources focus on the thousand 'Apple-bearers'".^[8][9] The figures are certainly royal guards, and they show us, in colour, how such a guardsman looked: the long robe, the curved bow over the shoulder, the tasselled quiver, the spear with its rounded butt resting on the foot. What they are not is a captioned portrait of "the Immortals." The same caution applies to the guardsmen carved on the royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam, where even Briant, describing the armed attendants, writes only "guards (the Immortals?)", with the question mark doing necessary work.^[5]

How we know

The evidentiary position for the Immortals is lopsided in the extreme, and it is worth stating baldly, because the confident modern image obscures it. Effectively everything narrative we have comes from Greek writers, and overwhelmingly from Herodotus, a generation and more after the events, an outsider using Greek categories, and demonstrably shaped by a literary discourse about the vast, gilded, soft eastern host. The later Greek and Latin notices, Heracleides, Athenaeus, Hesychius, the Alexander historians, either quote Herodotus, depend on him, or add court-anecdote of their own colouring. From the Persian side there is, on the guard specifically, almost nothing: no royal inscription names it, no administrative tablet labels a "ten thousand", the corps' own Iranian name is lost, and the celebrated Susa frieze is anonymous. This is precisely why the specialist monograph, Manning's Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire, declines to treat the "ten thousand Immortals" at length at all: it is, he writes, "so hard to connect the classical sources which mention them to other evidence", and the speculations about an Old Persian word for "companion" and about Indo-European warrior-bands "rest upon a tiny base of evidence."^[9] The prudent reconstruction keeps only what is well founded: a standing royal guard of about ten thousand Persian foot, held permanently at strength, with an inner thousand of noble spear-bearers (the later mēlophoroi) as the king's close bodyguard under the chiliarch. The rest, the Old Persian name, the exact equipment and its adequacy, the portrait at Susa, the corps' history after 480, is either conjecture or Greek image, and this compendium marks it as such rather than smoothing it into the seamless, golden legend that the name "Immortals" so easily invites.