Force
Persian Immortals
The 10,000-man royal guard of the Achaemenid kings, kept at constant strength — every fallen man immediately replaced, hence the name.
The Immortals were the household infantry of the Achaemenid kings — a corps Herodotus numbers at exactly ten thousand, kept at strength by immediate replacement of any man lost, so that the formation itself never died. The name is probably a Greek's misreading of a Persian title, but the idea it captures — a permanent, full-strength royal guard — was real and unique in its age.
They were the empire's elite in both war and splendor. Herodotus describes spears with silver and gold pomegranate butts, embroidered robes over scale armor, and baggage trains of their own. Their arms were the Persian standard: short spear, powerful composite bow, wicker spara shield, and the akinakes short sword — a combination built for the massed archery-and-shield warfare of the Near East rather than the shock collision of the Greek phalanx.
That difference wrote their most famous chapter: at Thermopylae in 480 BC the Immortals were the force sent over the mountain path to close the trap on Leonidas. They fought through Plataea and remained the guard of kings until Alexander destroyed the empire at Gaugamela in 331 BC. The glazed-brick archers of Susa — perhaps their portrait — remain among the most beautiful military images antiquity left behind.
Battles & Operations
Weapons
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Greek Aspis
The aspis was the great round shield of the Greek hoplite: a deep bowl of laminated wood about 90 centimeters across, often faced in thin bronze, carried on the forearm by a central armband and a grip at the rim. Heavy and awkward for a lone man, it was built for the phalanx, where each shield half-covered the soldier to the left and the line held or broke together. The Spartan mother's command to come home 'with it or on it' made the aspis the symbol of Greek citizen soldiering for two and a half thousand years.
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Greek Kopis
The kopis was the forward-curved, single-edged chopping sword of classical Greece. Its blade is concave near the hilt and swells toward the tip, putting the weight forward so that a cut lands like an axe blow. Used from the sixth century BC by hoplites, and especially favored for cavalry — Xenophon recommended it over the straight sword for a horseman — it is often shown in the hands of Spartans on painted pottery. It was a cousin of the Iberian falcata and a distant relative of the Egyptian khopesh and later Balkan and Nepalese blades.
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Greek Xiphos
The xiphos was the sidearm of the Greek hoplite: a double-edged, leaf-bladed short sword drawn when the spear — always the primary weapon — shattered in the press of the phalanx. Typically around 45 to 60 centimeters, waisted then swelling toward the point, it cut and thrust equally well in the shield-to-shield crush where no longer blade could work. Sparta, characteristically, carried the shortest versions of all — close enough, they said, to reach the enemy.
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Hoplite Dory
The dory was the thrusting spear of the Greek hoplite, the main weapon of the citizen soldiers who fought in the phalanx from the seventh century BC to the rise of Macedon. Seven to nine feet long, with an iron leaf-shaped head and a bronze butt-spike called the sauroter, it was held in one hand while the other carried the great round aspis shield. It won Marathon and Plataea, armed the Spartans at Thermopylae, and made the Greek heavy infantryman the most feared foot soldier of the Mediterranean world for three centuries.
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Persian Akinakes
The akinakes is the straight, double-edged short sword of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, borrowed from the Scythian horsemen of the steppe and worn by Persian soldiers and courtiers alike from the sixth to the fourth century BC. Instantly recognizable by its heart-shaped guard and by the scabbard hung on the right hip with a strap to the thigh, it was the sidearm of the Immortals and a badge of rank at the Great King's court. The Greeks, who met it at Marathon, Thermopylae, and Plataea, used its name for any Persian sword.