'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎571] (638/714)

CHAPTER XVII
THE ARMY
Prince Henry—I did never see such pitiful rascals !
Falstaff- Tut ! tut! good enough to toss ; food for powder, food for powder,
they'll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.
Shakspeare.— Henry IV., Part i., act iv., sc. ii.
From the time when Persian soldiers were first seen in Europe,
and when, according to Herodotus, who gives a most minute ac
count of their organisation and equipment, £ the Persians
die Persian at Platsea were not one whit inferior to the Greeks in
army courage and warlike spirit,' 1 down to the present day,
when he would be a bold critic who would institute even such a
comparison, the Persian army has in many and shifting phases
afforded material of interest to the traveller and the historian. The
vision of the 10,000 Immortals, marching in serried ranks, with the
golden pomegranates flashing on their spears, has early impressed
our imagination ; and in the distant galleries of time few echoes i iug
more loudly than the clash of Persian and Grecian onset upon the
fields of Marathon and Thermopylae, ot Cunaxa, of Issus and Avbela.
These illustrious memories we must here relinquish, nor does space
admit of our recovering from the oblivion with which they have
been long overlaid, the armaments and tactics, the marches and
combats, of the Parthian and Sassanian kings. 2 It was not till
the dawn of the seventeenth century that the foundations of a
modern standing army were laid in Persia, or that the military
ideas of the West were perfunctorily grafted on to the Oriental
stock. Here, in brief retrospect, our study of the Persian army
may begin, the moment when a European turn was given to its
organisation being also the moment when the connection between
itself and England, that has had so many and fateful vicissitudes,
1 Herodotus, ix. 62.
2 Cedrenus says of Chosroes I. (Nushirwan), that he invented an engine which
' guttas demitteret tanquam pluviam et tonitrus sonitus resonaret. But hat w as
the exact nature of this early anticipation of Greek fire we cannot determine.