Author: rez
Original Thread: Did The 'Immortals' Fight At Platea?

Did The 'Immortals' Fight At Platea? And If they did what can we learn from this tiny piece of information?


Quite a lot actually. But first lets discuss the possibility that they were absent since it is a minority theory.

Xenophon tells us that a bodyguard of ten thousand spearmen was created by Cyrus the Great to protect the King. They travelled with him and guarded either his tent or palace as required. In battle they were drawn up around the King (Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 7. 5. 66-68).

Now Lendering and, to an extent, Briant suggest that due to their duty as the bodyguards of the King they would not have been seperated from Xerxes after Salamis. For who then would guard his person? Moreover the tale of Hydarnes, commander of the immortals, refusing to be parted from the King lends at least some credence to the idea that they would not operate away from the monarch.

However, this obviously directly contravenes the words of Herodotus who explicitly states the immortals stayed with Mardonius in Greece. But he doesn't, however, actually mention them during the battle he simply refers to "The Persians." (Herodotus, 9. 59-68).

The idea being that Mardonius retained the regular regiment of Persians but Herodotus named them as the immortals since his narrative required the Greeks to defeat the best of the Persians.


On the other hand, the Immortals are directly referenced as being a part of Mardonius' army (Herodotus, 8. 113). But to my mind the most obvious flaw in the above theory is the idea that the King required 10,000 bodyguards.

It seems to me that Xenophon is confusing the Immortals with the 'Melophoroi' (Greek) or 'Arstibara' (old Persian). Who formed a guard of 1000 men and turn up in numerous Greek sources. The most explicit of which being Heraclides of Cyme who states in his Persica that the King's bodyguard comprised 1000 well-born spearmen who were recruited from the Immortals (Athenaeus, 12. 514c). Moreover Herodotus mentions a thousand man corps of high-born spearmen in his description of Xerxes march (Herodotus, 7. 41). Persian bodyguard divisions might have been uniformly made up of 1000 men since the noble Oroetus also retained 1000 Persian spearmen (Herodotus 3. 127-128).

But other than this we simply have to look at the duty required of these guardsmen and ask ourselves how anyone could require ten thousand men to serve as a personal guard? For those of you fortunate enough to have been to Persepolis you will know that the palace would not have required anywhere near the amount of ten thousand men to successfully guard it. Of course any other capitals the Persian monarch would have resided at would certainly have included their own sizeable garrisons since they were the chief cities of the empire. We would also have to wonder who was guarding Xerxes' tent and person during the operation at Thermopylae.

Thus it appears that Xenophon was describing the wrong unit for his King's bodyguard. So if Xenophon was wrong and the Immortals comprised a legitimate military division then the only reasoning left to suggest that the Immortals weren't at Platea is to assert that Herodotus was lying. Frankly that kind of assertion without any corroboration is plain useless.

Hence we can be pretty certain that the Immortals fought at Platea. Now what does that tell us about the Immortals?

Well obviously the first assertion is that the regiment was capable of operating without Royal leadership. Secondly that the stable rock of the Achaemenid military infrastructure was utterly destroyed in the invasion of Greece. But for me the most interesting information comes in the armament of the Immortals.

Herodotus tells us that the Persian infantry marched to war with Spear, shield, sword, bow and arrow. Thus you will often find (terrible) reconstructions of the Immortals that portray a soldier carrying all of this equipment.



However the description of the battle at Platea heavily implies that the Persians had a wall of shielded spearmen protecting archers who drew swords when the Spartans killed the shield bearers (Herodotus, 9. 61-63). The tactics described indicate the Immortals carried the Spara shield rather than the Diplyon and they certainly couldn't have all carried all the weaponry described. We can however assert that all of the Immortals wore armour in the light of Herodotus' original description and the multiple instances of attic pottery depicting cuirassed archers. Particularly this vase dated to the 460's which appears to have been immortalising the Spartan effort at Platea.



At any rate we can tell that the disposition of the Immortals, in regards to their offensive weaponry and tactics, was exactly the same as the regular Persian line infantry. The areas where they differed can be summarised in the three main features of their distinction - Their continuous deployment, their higher rate of pay and their continual supply of picked replacements. These main features are the reasons for their better defensive equipment, better training and overall tactical superiority to other Achaemenid units.