* The date 462 is approximate, and is inferred from the fact
that the war in Bactriana is mentioned in Ctesias between
the war against the sons of Artabanus which must have
occupied a part of 463, and the Egyptian rebellion which
broke out about 462, as Diodorus Siculus points out,
doubtless following Ephorus.
** The name of the father of Inaros is given us by the
contemporary testimony of Thucydides.
*** Achomenes is the form given by Herodotus and by Diodorus
Siculus, who make him the son of Darius I., appointed
governor of Egypt after the repression of the revolt of
Khabbîsha. Ctesias calls him Achæmenides, and says that he
was the son of Xerxes.
Meanwhile the satrap, fearing that the troops at his disposal were insufficient, had gone to beg assistance of his nephew. Artaxerxes had assembled an army and a fleet, and, in the first moment of enthusiasm, had intended to assume the command in person; but, by the advice of his counsellors, he was with little difficulty dissuaded from carrying this whim into effect, and he delegated the conduct of affairs to Achæmenes. The latter at first repulsed the Libyans (460), and would probably have soon driven them back into their deserts, had not the Athenians interfered in the fray. They gave orders to their fleet at Cyprus to support the insurgents by every means in their power, and their appearance on the scene about the autumn of 469 changed the course of affairs. Achæmenes was overcome at Papremis, and his army almost completely exterminated. Inaros struck him down with his own hand in the struggle; but the same evening he caused the body to be recovered, and sent it to the court of Susa, though whether out of bravado, or from respect to the Achæmenian race, it is impossible to say.*
* Diodorus Siculus says in so many words that the Athenians
took part in the battle of Papremis; Thucydides and
Herodotus do not speak of their being there, and several
modern historians take this silence as a proof that their
squadron arrived after the battle had been fought.
His good fortune did not yet forsake him. Some days afterwards, the Athenian squadron of Charitimides came up by chance with the Phoenician fleet, which was sailing to the help of the Persians, and had not yet received the news of the disaster which had befallen them at Papremis. The Greeks sunk thirty of the enemy’s vessels and took twenty more, and, after this success, the allies believed that they had merely to show themselves to bring about a general rising of the fellahîn, and effect the expulsion of the Persians from the whole of Egypt. They sailed up the river and forced Memphis after a few days’ siege; but the garrison of the White Wall refused to surrender, and the allies were obliged to lay siege to it in the ordinary manner (459):* in the issue this proved their ruin. Artaxerxes raised a fresh force in Cilicia, and while completing his preparations, attempted to bring about a diversion in Greece. The strength of Pharaoh did not so much depend on his Libyan and Egyptian hordes, as on the little body of hoplites and the crews of the Athenian squadron; and if the withdrawal of the latter could be effected, the repulse of the others would be a certainty. Persian agents were therefore employed to beg the Spartans to invade Attica; but the remembrance of Salamis and Platæa was as yet too fresh to permit of the Lacedæmonians allying themselves with the common enemy, and their virtue on this occasion was proof against the darics of the Orientals.** The Egyptian army was placed in the field early in the year 456, under the leadership of Megabyzos, the satrap of Syria: it numbered, so it was said, some 300,000 men, and it was supported by 300 Phoenician vessels commanded by Artabazos.***
* The date of 459-8 for the arrival of the Athenians is
concluded from the passage of Thucydides, who gives an
account of the end of the war after the cruise of Tolmides
in 455, in the sixth year of its course.
** Megabyzos opened these negotiations, and his presence at
Sparta during the winter of 457-6 is noticed.
*** Ctesias here introduces the Persian admiral Horiscos,
but Diodorus places Artabazos and Megabyzos side by side, as
was the case later on in the war in Cyprus, one at the head
of the fleet, the other of the army; it is probable that the
historian from whom Diodorus copied, viz. Ephorus,
recognised the same division of leadership in the Egyptian
campaign.
The allies raised the blockade of the White Wall as soon as he entered the Delta, and hastened to attack him; but they had lost their opportunity. Defeated in a desperate encounter, in which Charitimides was killed and Inaros wounded in the thigh, they barricaded themselves within the large island of Prosopitis, about the first fortnight in January of the year 455, and there sustained a regular siege for the space of eighteen months. At the end of that time Megabyzos succeeded in turning an arm of the river, which left their fleet high and dry, and, rather than allow it to fall into his hands, they burned their vessels, whereupon he gave orders to make the final assault. The bulk of the Athenian auxiliaries perished in that day’s attack, the remainder withdrew with Inaros into the fortified town of Byblos, where Megabyzos, unwilling to prolong a struggle with a desperate enemy, permitted them to capitulate on honourable terms. Some of them escaped and returned to Cyrene, from whence they took ship to their own country; but the main body, to the number of 6000, were carried away to Susa by Megabyzos in order to receive the confirmation of the treaty which he had concluded. As a crowning stroke of misfortune, a reinforcement of fifty Athenian triremes, which at this juncture entered the Mendesian mouth of the Nile, was surrounded by the Phoenician fleet, and more than half of them destroyed. The fall of Prosopitis brought the rebellion to an end.*
* The accounts of these events given by Ctesias and
Thucydides are complementary, and, in spite of their
brevity, together form a whole which must be sufficiently
near the truth. That of Ephorus, preserved in Diodorus, is
derived from an author who shows partiality to the
Athenians, and who passes by everything not to their honour,
while he seeks to throw the blame for the final disaster on
the cowardice of the Egyptians. The summary of Aristodemus
comes directly from that of Thucydides.
The nomes of the Delta were restored to order, and, as was often customary in Oriental kingdoms, the vanquished petty princes or their children were reinvested in their hereditary fiefs; even Libya was not taken from the family of Inaros, but was given to his son Thannyras and a certain Psammetichus. A few bands of fugitives, however, took refuge in the marshes of the littoral, in the place where the Saites in former times had sought a safe retreat, and they there proclaimed king a certain Amyrtgeus, who was possibly connected with the line of Amasis, and successfully defied the repeated attempts of the Persians to dislodge them.
The Greek league had risked the best of its forces in this rash undertaking, and had failed in its enterprise. It had cost the allies so dearly in men and galleys, that if the Persians had at once assumed the offensive, most of the Asiatic cities would have found themselves in a most critical situation; and Athens, then launched in a quarrel with the states of the Peloponnesus, would have experienced the greatest difficulty in succouring them. The feebleness of Artaxerxes, however, and possibly the intrigues at court and troubles in various other parts of the empire, prevented the satraps from pursuing their advantage, and when at length they meditated taking action, the opportunity had gone by. They nevertheless attempted to regain the ascendency over Cyprus; Artabazos with a Sidonian fleet cruised about the island, Megabyzos assembled troops in Cilicia, and the petty kings of Greek origin raised a cry of alarm. Athens, which had just concluded a truce with the Peloponnesians, at once sent two hundred vessels to their assistance under the command of Oimon (449). Cimon acted as though he were about to reopen the campaign in Egypt and despatched sixty of his triremes to King Amyrtceus, while he himself took Marion and blockaded Kition with the rest of his forces. The siege dragged on; he was perhaps about to abandon it, when he took to his bed and died. Those who succeeded him in the command were obliged to raise the blockade for want of provisions, but as they returned and were passing Salamis, they fell in with the Phoenician vessels which had just been landing the Cilician troops, and defeated them; they then disembarked, and, as at Mycale and Eurymedon, they gained a second victory in the open field, after which they joined the squadron which had been sent to Egypt, and sailed for Athens with the dead body of their chief. They had once more averted the danger of an attack on the Ægean, but that was all. The Athenian statesmen had for some time past realised that it was impossible for them to sustain a double conflict, and fight the battles of Greece against the common enemy, while half of the cities whose safety was secured by their heroic devotion were harassing them on the continent, but the influence of Cimon had up till now encouraged them to persist; on the death of Cimon, they gave up the attempt, and Callias, one of their leaders, repaired in state to Susa for the purpose of opening negotiations. The peace which was concluded on the occasion of this embassy might at first sight appear advantageous to their side. The Persian king, without actually admitting his reverses, accepted their immediate consequences. He recognised the independence of the Asiatic Creeks, of those at least who belonged to the league of Delos, and he promised that his armies on land should never advance further than three days’ march from the Ægean littoral. On the seas, he forbade his squadrons to enter Hellenic waters from the Chelidonian to the Cyanæan rocks—that is, from the eastern point of Lycia to the opening of the Black Sea: this prohibition did not apply to the merchant vessels of the contracting parties, and they received permission to traffic freely in each other’s waters—the Phoenicians in Greece, and the Greeks in Phonicia, Cilicia, and Egypt. And yet, when we consider the matter, Athens and Hellas were, of the two, the greater losers by this convention, which appeared to imply their superiority. Not only did they acknowledge indirectly that they felt themselves unequal to the task of overthrowing the empire, but they laid down their arms before they had accomplished the comparatively restricted task which they had set themselves to perform, that of freeing all the Greeks from the Iranian yoke: their Egyptian compatriots still remained Persian tributaries, in company with the cities of Cyrenaïca, Pamphylia, and Cilicia, and, above all, that island of Cyprus in which they had gained some of their most signal triumphs. The Persians, relieved from a war which for a quarter of a century had consumed their battalions and squadrons, drained their finances, and excited their subjects to revolt, were now free to regain their former wealth and perhaps their vigour, could they only find generals to command their troops and guide their politics. Artaxerxes was incapable of directing this revival, and his inveterate weakness exposed him perpetually to the plotting of his satraps or to the intrigues of the women of his harem. The example of Artabanus, followed by that of Hystaspes, had shown how easy it was for an ambitious man to get rid secretly of a monarch or a prince and seriously endanger the crown. The members of the families who had placed Darius on the throne, possessed by hereditary right, or something little short of it, the wealthiest and most populous provinces—Babylonia, Syria, Lydia, Phrygia, and the countries of the Halys—and they were practically kings in all but name, in spite of the surveillance which the general and the secretary were supposed to exercise over their actions. Besides this, the indifference and incapacity of the ruling sovereigns had already tended to destroy the order of the administrative system so ably devised by Darius: the satrap had, as a rule, absorbed the functions of a general within his own province, and the secretary was too insignificant a personage to retain authority and independence unless he received the constant support of the sovereign. The latter, a tool in the hands of women and eunuchs, usually felt himself powerless to deal with his great vassals. His toleration went to all lengths if he could thereby avoid a revolt; when this was inevitable, and the rebels were vanquished, he still continued to conciliate them, and in most cases their fiefs and rights were preserved or restored to them, the monarch knowing that he could rid himself of them treacherously by poison or the dagger in the case of their proving themselves too troublesome. Megabyzos by his turbulence was a thorn in the side of Artaxerxes during the half of his reign. He had ended his campaign in Egypt by engaging to preserve the lives of Inaros and the 6000 Greeks who had capitulated at Byblos, and, in spite of the anger of the king, he succeeded in keeping his word for five years, but at the end of that time the demands of Amestris prevailed. She succeeded in obtaining from him some fifty Greeks whom she beheaded, besides Inaros himself, whom she impaled to avenge Achæmenes. Megabyzos, who had not recovered from the losses he had sustained in his last campaign against Cimon, at first concealed his anger, but he asked permission to visit his Syrian province, and no sooner did he reach it, than he resorted to hostilities. He defeated in succession Usiris and Menostates, the two generals despatched against him, and when force failed to overcome his obstinate resistance, the government condescended to treat with him, and swore to forget the past if he would consent to lay down arms. To this he agreed, and reappeared at court; but once there, his confidence nearly proved fatal to him. Having been invited to take part in a hunt, he pierced with his javelin a lion which threatened to attack the king: Artaxerxes called to mind an ancient law which punished by death any intervention of that kind, and he ordered that the culprit should be beheaded. Megabyzos with difficulty escaped this punishment through the entreaties of Amestris and of his wife Amytis; but he was deprived of his fiefs, and sent to Kyrta, on the shores of the Persian Gulf. After five years this exile became unbearable; he therefore spread the report that he was attacked by leprosy, and he returned home without any one venturing to hinder him, from fear of defiling themselves by contact with his person. Amestris and Amytis brought about his reconciliation with his sovereign; and thenceforward he regulated his conduct so successfully that the past was completely forgotten, and when he died, at the age of seventy-six years, Artaxerxes deeply regretted his loss.*
* These events are known to us only through Ctesias. Their
date is uncertain, but there is no doubt that they occurred
after Cimon’s campaign in Cyprus and the conclusion of the
peace of Callias.