Hello and welcome to another episode of the ancient warfare answers podcast.

My name is Jasper Ortuz. I am the editor of Ancient Warfare Magazine and with me is Murray Dam.

He is the assistant editor.

Hello.

And today we're going to talk about the Persian immortals.

What do we know about them?

Well, Murray, what do we know about them?

Well, most of our literary information about the immortals, the Athenatoi, I hope I pronounce that correctly with my ancient Greek, is from Herodotus.

So he starts looking at them in book seven of his histories and seems fascinated with them as a unit that never fell below the number of 10,000. He tells us that

each man was selected from the bravest of the levies from media and Persia only, and that casualties

were immediately replaced as soon as possible, and that they were replaced from other units from media and Persia in the Persian army.

The funny thing about it, of course, is that under the narratives of Alexander the Great,

we don't get immortals mentioned at all.

We get apple bearers mentioned, which kind of confuses things, even though we think that they're probably the same unit.

So we've got the apple bearers in Aryan and Diodorus, and they seem to be an elite unit of 10,000.

And that's a really interesting one because, of course,

when it comes to what exactly were they, it may have been a misunderstanding of their

Persian title, which might have meant something like companions. And so they sort of get turned into an immortal force who of course show up at the Battle of Thermopylae.

The pomegranate or apple on their spear, we think that the base of their spear had a golden or a silver pomegranate or an apple to possibly signify their rank or possibly

signify that they were an immortal. It's hard to know. Those are possibly the guys that we see

on some of those famous glazed tiles, right? Yes. I'm sure you've all seen those. Exactly,

but we get that as a sort of a depiction of the immortals at the Palace of Darius.

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