The Immortals

"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 and not on any independent Persian source.^[1] There is no attested Old Persian, Elamite or Babylonian word to 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 judgement, "cannot be solved, because authentic sources are missing."^[1]

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. That is a hypothesis, and a contested one.

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][2] 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.^[3] 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.^[3] Others again have tried to recover a positive Old Persian name, reconstructing *Amrtaka, "immortal", to lie behind the Greek, as Nicholas Sekunda has proposed;^[2] 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 a Greek coinage with no secure Old Persian original behind it, and the popular "mistranslation of anūšiya" story is one modern conjecture (Pagliaro's) among several, weighed down with objections. What the sources do support with some confidence is not the name but the thing.

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^[4]

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.^[5] The round ten thousand is best read as an establishment figure, the strength at which the corps was held rather than a headcount taken on any one day; what the institution guaranteed was permanence, a body that did not shrink between wars as a seasonal levy did and could therefore be drilled, housed and paid as a career force. That is the substance behind the poetic name: not that the men were deathless, but that the unit was. 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.^[6] 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 writes, not actually clear from Herodotus' words.^[1]

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^[7]

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."^[8] 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.^[6] Darius I himself, before he was king, is said to have served as a spear-bearer (doryphoros) to Cambyses, a sign that the guard was the school and the proving-ground of the Persian nobility.^[5]

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 that can actually be attached to a word is ṛštibara-, "spear-bearer", the native term the Greeks rendered as doryphoros and, for the apple-bearing inner corps, mēlophoros.^[9]

The apple-bearers belong as much to the court as to the field. In the same fragment, Heracleides places the mēlophoroi inside the palace, in a hall named for them, through which the King walked alone over Sardian carpets no other foot might touch, watching over the audience and the royal person by day and night.^[8] Llewellyn-Jones reads the corps in this light, as the household troops of an intensely ceremonial monarchy whose first charge was the safety and the seclusion of the King rather than the battle line; their Greek fame as fighting soldiers is in part an accident of the single campaign a Greek historian chose to narrate at length.^[10]

Where the guard came from, the Persian record does not say. The one surviving origin-story 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.^[6] 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.^[11] The Immortals stand at the top of a structure that is better attested in its lower rungs than its upper ones.

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, Manning concludes, "no basis for describing the other Persian weapons as inferior" either.^[11] 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.^[11] 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.

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^[12]

The outcome followed from the ground, not from any weakness in the guard. Where the pass was narrowest the Persians could bring only a fraction of their strength into contact at once, so that their one great advantage, numbers, counted for nothing against a standing line of hoplite shields; the guard was held there as the Medes had been, until Hydarnes turned the position by a night march over the mountain path. Herodotus' "shorter spears" is here again the cliché and not a tactical report, and the rhetoric should be discounted.^[11] The flanking march need not have used the whole ten thousand; a picked force moving by night over the narrow Anopaia track would have served, and setting such men to such a task is the ordinary use of a standing elite.

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.^[5] Curtius' account of the King's march to Issus gives the fullest picture, and it reads as a procession rather than an order of battle:

Next in line were the soldiers whom the Persians call Immortals, some 10,000 in number. No other group were so well bedecked with barbaric splendour: golden necklaces, clothes interwoven with gold, long-sleeved tunics actually studded with precious stones.

Curtius Rufus 3.3.13, trans. Llewellyn-Jones^[13]

The guard here wears the very gold and gemmed sleeves Herodotus had given it at Sardis a century and a half earlier, which is one reason to suspect the Alexander historians of dressing a real Persian bodyguard in Herodotus' vocabulary. The mention of the Immortals in these 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 rather than as a continuously documented Persian unit. The institution even outlived the dynasty that built it: when Alexander took over the Persian court and its ceremonial he kept a guard of Persian apple-bearers about his throne, five hundred of them stationed in his audience tent in purple and yellow, the corps' last attested appearance, now guarding the Macedonian who had destroyed the house they were raised to serve.^[10]

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", but 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 ultimately on Herodotus.^[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 'Applebearers'".^[9][11] Read without the label, the reliefs still establish a great deal: the appearance of an Achaemenid royal guardsman, and one that matches the texts closely enough to show why the identification tempts. Duncan Head, reconstructing the guard from the monuments, sets the Susa figures in the long Persian court robe and the Persepolis guardsmen in both that dress and the "Median" riding coat, some carrying spear and bow, others spear and a tall wicker or leather shield, so that the archers and the shield-bearers of Herodotus' description can both be found on the walls.^[14] The silver and gold "pomegranate" spear-butts of the procession answer to the rounded butts the sculptors carved, and the gold necklaces and jewelled sleeves the Greek and Alexander-era descriptions give the guard answer to the jewelled figures of the frieze.^[14] The correspondence is genuine: the images confirm that such guardsmen existed and how they were equipped and arrayed, though nothing on the brick or the stone names a unit. Llewellyn-Jones states the position plainly: it is generally assumed that the richly liveried soldiers of the Susa tiles and the Persepolis reliefs are the Immortals, but "there is nothing categorically to support this idea."^[10] 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?)", leaving the identification open.^[6]

No Achaemenid unit is better known to a general public, and almost none is known so largely through invention. The name's pull is old, but its modern shape owes most to popular history and fiction, to the video game, and above all to the film 300 and the graphic novel behind it, in which the King's guardsmen appear as masked, monstrous shock-troops, faceless and inhuman. That picture descends from the hostile Greek portrait of the Persian: it takes the old contrast between free Hellenes and the King's subjects and strips out even the concessions to Persian courage that Herodotus himself allowed. The historical corps, so far as the evidence reaches, was the opposite of a horde: a professional, largely hereditary, richly equipped royal guard, the school of the Persian nobility and the household troops of the court. The unit's fame and the unit's surviving evidence have never been the same thing, and the gap between them was filled, then as now, by a Greek story.