Topic: court (3)

• SourceAeschylus, Persae (The Persians)

  The earliest surviving account of any Achaemenid event by a contemporary, and the only Greek tragedy on a historical subject to come down to us: staged at Athens in 472 BCE, eight years after Salamis, by a poet who by tradition had himself fought the Persians. It stages the Persian defeat from the enemy's side, as the lament of the losers (Atossa, the ghost of Darius, Xerxes home in rags), and it is a founding text of the Greek 'barbarian' construct. It is drama, not history: Athenian civic self-celebration performed for the victors. Yet it preserves a near-contemporary image, a roster of genuine Iranian names, and a real sense of the fleet and the battle, and it must be weighed line by line for the few things it can be trusted for.

• SourceCtesias, The Persica

  The lost history of Persia by a Greek physician who served for years at the court of Artaxerxes II, the one classical author who wrote from inside the palace, and the least trustworthy of them. The Persica survives only in Photius' Byzantine epitome and scattered fragments; it is sensational, chronologically garbled, and repeatedly wrong against the Iranian record, yet it is our fullest window on the court's own tales, the royal women, and the reign of Artaxerxes II, and the modern reassessment reads it as a witness to Persian palace tradition rather than as a mere catalogue of lies.

• ConceptThe Immortals

  The 10,000-strong standing corps of elite Persian foot that guarded the King of Kings and formed the professional heart of the field army, famous under the Greek name Herodotus gave them, 'the Immortals' (athanatoi), because the corps was kept always at exactly ten thousand: a fallen or sick man was at once replaced. Almost everything vivid about them is Greek, and Herodotus above all; the Persian-side evidence is very thin. Their true Old Persian name is unknown, the popular claim that 'Immortals' is a mistranslation of anūšiya ('followers') is a modern conjecture and not established fact, and the celebrated glazed-brick 'archer' frieze from Susa is called 'the Immortals' only by a modern and unproven label. What is secure is the institution: a permanent royal guard, its inner thousand the king's spear-bearing bodyguard whom later writers call the 'apple-bearers' (mēlophoroi).