Persian Empire
Q & A 5 min read

What Was the Parthian Shot?

The Parthian shot is the mounted archery manoeuvre in which a horseman turns his body in the saddle to fire backwards on a pursuing enemy, and it was one of the signature tactics of the Parthian army. Horace, in Odes 1.19, calls the Parthian “the man who trusts not in flight but in his bow reversed” (versis animosum… arcum); Virgil, in Georgics 3.31, treats the Parthian’s flight as a feint. Plutarch describes the manoeuvre in detail in the Life of Crassus 24, where it is the central image of the famous battle.

The technique was not original to the Parthians. Firing backwards from horseback was a steppe staple from the Scythians onward, and was practised by the Sarmatians, the Sacae, the Dahae, and the other Iranian-speaking peoples of Central Asia. The Parthians refined it into a system and used it to devastating effect in their wars with Rome; the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE is the famous case.

How it worked

The Parthian shot required considerable skill in both horsemanship and archery. The archer sat on a small wooden saddle — of the type that became standard across Eurasia — that allowed him to ride with stability and to turn in the saddle to fire in any direction. The archer held the reins in one hand and the composite bow in the other; he would turn his body to face the rear, plant his feet in the stirrups, and fire an arrow over the rear of his horse. The shot required the archer to maintain his balance at full gallop, to control the horse with his legs, and to fire accurately with the bow. Only the most skilled horse archers could perform it with consistency. The famous Arrian (Tactica 23–24) treats it as a standard cavalry exercise and notes that it is a “Median” technique, meaning steppe Iranian.

The weapon was the composite bow, a short (about 80 cm), double-curved bow of wood, horn, and sinew. The composite bow was a steppe invention; it had a much greater range and penetrating power than the self-bow of the Mediterranean, and it was the bow that made horse archery possible. A skilled archer could fire accurately at full gallop, and could loose ten to fifteen arrows in a minute. The bow was, in turn, made possible by the saddle: without a firm seat, the full draw of the composite bow was difficult if not impossible. The three — horse, saddle, bow — were a package.

What the shot did in battle

The Parthian shot was the signature moment of the faux retrait — the feigned retreat. The Parthian horse archers would pretend to flee from the enemy, drawing the enemy out of formation, and then turn and fire on the pursuers. The feigned retreat was supported by a doctrine of coordination, in which the horse archers would draw the enemy into a killing ground where the cataphracts, held in reserve, would be waiting. The Parthian shot was the moment at which the retreating archers suddenly wheeled and fired; the cataphract charge was the moment that decided the engagement.

The most famous use of the system was at Carrhae in 53 BCE, when the Parthian general Surena used a combination of horse archers and cataphracts to destroy the Roman army of Crassus. The Parthian horse archers surrounded the Roman army, pretended to retreat, and then poured a continuous shower of arrows into the Roman infantry, which had been forced into a defensive square by the arrow fire. The Roman army was gradually worn down; the cataphracts then charged, and the Roman formation broke. The Parthian shot was the central component of the Parthian success at Carrhae, and the system was much admired and frequently imitated.

The literary afterlife

The Parthian shot became proverbial in the ancient world. Virgil mentions it in the Aeneid; Horace in the Odes; Plutarch in the Life of Crassus; Arrian in the Tactica, where he treats it as a standard example of steppe cavalry tactics. The Parthian shot was also a popular subject in ancient art: Parthian coins, Parthian reliefs, and Parthian metalwork all show the mounted archer in the act of turning to fire. The Parthian shot became one of the universal symbols of the Parthian empire.

The Parthian shot is mentioned by Roman writers as a kind of moral lesson. Pursuing a retreating enemy, the Romans liked to say, was a fool’s game: the Parthian would turn and shoot you in the back. Horace, in Odes 1.19, uses the Parthian shot as a metaphor for the dangers of overreaching; Virgil, in Georgics 3.31, treats the Parthian’s flight as a feint. The Parthian shot, in the Roman imagination, was both a tactical threat and a moral figure.

The later life of the technique

The Parthian shot survived as a military technique long after the fall of the Parthian empire. The Sasanian cavalry, the Byzantine cataphracts, the Magyar horsemen, the Mongol horse archers, and the early Islamic cavalry all used similar techniques. The technique survived into the early modern period in the tactics of the Hungarian hussars, the Russian Cossacks, and the cavalry of the Ottoman and Persian empires. The Parthian shot was, by any measure, an influential military technique of the ancient world, and it has been a part of the military repertoire of the Eurasian peoples for more than two thousand years. The term itself, “Parthian shot,” entered modern English as a metaphor for a parting retort, a final witty remark at the moment of departure. The metaphorical use is a small but useful piece of evidence that the literary image survived the Parthian state itself by a long way.

For further reading

  • Bivar, A. D. H. “Cavalry Equipment and Tactics on the Euphrates Frontier,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. III (1983).
  • Farrokh, Kaveh. Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War (2007).
  • Pourshariati, Parvaneh. Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire (2008).
  • Arrian, Tactica, trans. and ed. by A. S. L. Farquharson (Oxford, 1944). The Greek tactical manual with the most useful discussion of steppe archery.