Six years after this, the Athenians resolved on another effort.  A fleet of 200 ships was equipped and placed under the command of the victor of the Eurymedon, Cimon, with orders to proceed into the Eastern Mediterranean, and seek to recover the laurels lost in Egypt.  Cimon sailed to Cyprus, where he received a communication from Amyrtseus, which induced him to dispatch sixty ships to Egypt, while with the remaining one hundred and forty he commenced the siege of Citium.  Here he died, either of disease or from the effects of a wound; and his armament, pressed for provisions, was forced soon afterwards to raise the siege, and address itself to some other enterprise.  Sailing past Salamis, it found there a Cilician and Phoenician fleet, consisting of 300 vessels, which it immediately attacked and defeated, notwithstanding the disparity of number.  Besides the ships which were sunk, a hundred triremes were taken; and the sailors then landed and gained a victory over a Persian army upon the shore.  Artaxerxes, upon this, fearing lest he should lose Cyprus altogether, and thinking that, if Athens became mistress of this important island, she would always be fomenting insurrection in Egypt, made overtures for peace to the generals who were now in command.  His propositions were favorably received.  Peace was made on the following terms:—­Athens agreed to relinquish Cyprus, and recall her squadron from Egypt; while the king consented to grant freedom to all the Greek cities on the Asiatic continent, and not to menace them either by land or water.  The sea was divided between the two powers, Persian ships of war were not to sail to the west of Phaselis in the Levant, or of the Cyanean islands in the Euxine; and Greek war-ships, we may assume, were not to show themselves east of those limits.  On these conditions there was to be peace and amity between the Greeks and the Persians, and neither nation was to undertake any expeditions against the territories of the other.  Thus terminated the first period of hostility between Greece and Persia, a period of exactly half a century, commencing B.C. 499 and. ending B.C. 449, in the seventeenth year of Artaxerxes.

It was probably not many years after the conclusion of this peace that a rebellion broke out in Syria.  Megabyzus, the satrap of that important province, offended at the execution of Inarus, in violation of the promise which he had himself made to him, raised a revolt against his sovereign, defeated repeatedly the armies sent to reduce him to obedience, and finally treated with Artaxerxes as to the terms on which he would consent to be reconciled.  Thus was set an example, if not of successful insurrection, yet at any rate of the possibility of rebelling with impunity—­an example which could not fail to have a mischievous effect on the future relations of the monarch with his satraps.  It would have been better for the Empire had Megabyzus suffered the fate of Oroetes, instead of living to a good old age in high favor with the monarch whose power he had weakened and defied.