and Sparta, recalled by these reverses to a realisation of her position, wisely abandoned her inclination for distant enterprises.  Asia Minor was reconquered, and Persia passed from the position of a national enemy to that of the friend and arbiter of Greece; but she did so by force of circumstances only, and not from having merited in any way the supremacy she attained.  Her military energy, indeed, was far from being exhausted; but poor Artaxerxes, bewildered by the rivalries between his mother and his wives, did not know how to make the most of the immense resources still at his disposal, and he met with repeated checks as soon as he came face to face with a nation and leaders who refused to stoop to treachery.  He had no sooner recovered possession of the AEgean littoral than Egypt was snatched from his grasp by a new Pharaoh who had arisen in the Nile valley.  The peace had not been seriously disturbed in Egypt during the forty years which had elapsed since the defeat of Inarus.  Satrap had peaceably succeeded satrap in the fortress of Memphis; the exhaustion of Libya had pre-vented any movement on the part of Thannyras; the aged Amyrtaeus had passed from the scene, and his son, Pausiris, bent his neck submissively to the Persian yoke.  More than once, however, unexpected outbursts had shown that the fires of rebellion were still smouldering.  A Psammetichus, who reigned about 445 B.C. in a corner of the Delta, had dared to send corn and presents to the Athenians, then at war with Artaxerxes I., and the second year of Darius II. had been troubled by a sanguinary sedition, which, however, was easily suppressed by the governor then in power; finally, about 410 B.C., a king of Egypt had, not without some show of evidence, laid himself open to the charge of sending a piratical expedition into Phoenician waters, an Arab king having contributed to the enterprise.*

     * The revolt mentioned by Ctesias has nothing to do with the
     insurrection of the satrap of Egypt which is here referred
     to, the date of which is furnished by the Syncellus.

It was easy to see, moreover, from periodical revolts—­such as that of Megabyzos in Syria, those of Artyphios and Arsites, of Pissuthnes and Amorges in Asia Minor—­with what impunity the wrath of the great king could be defied:  it was not to be wondered at, therefore, that, about 405 B.C., an enemy should appear in the heart of the Delta in the person of a grandson and namesake of Amyrtaeus.  He did not at first rouse the whole country to revolt, for Egyptian troops were still numbered in the army of Artaxerxes at the battle of Cunaxa in 401 B.C.; but he succeeded in establishing a regular native government, and struggled so resolutely against the foreign domination that the historians of the sacred colleges inscribed his name on the list of the Pharaohs.  He is there made to represent a whole dynasty, the XXVIIIth which lasted six years, coincident with the six years of his reign.  It