When the Persians were only a few days’ march from the city, Thessalion lured the hundred chief citizens to the camp on the pretext of a general meeting, and they were put to death by javelin blows. The Sidonians, although abandoned by their king, still wished to hold out, but Mentor told them that their mercenaries would bring the enemy into the place at a moment’s notice; so after deciding to throw themselves on the mercy of the conqueror, five hundred of them were sent as deputies with olive branches in their hands. But Ochus was the cruellest, most blood-thirsty king Persia had ever had, and he treated the envoys in his usual way. The rest of the population, therefore, seeing that death was inevitable, shut themselves up in their houses and set fire to them. Forty thousand persons perished in the fire, and such was the wealth of the best houses, that the right of extracting from the ruins the ingots of gold and silver was sold at a high price. The punishment of the town was followed by the execution of Tennes, and the other cities, alarmed at his fate, opened their gates without striking a blow.
After the settlement of Syria, Ochus marched to Egypt without further delay. The Great King’s victories recalled the vacillating provinces to submission.
[340-338 B.C.]
The army was divided into three parts, each one commanded by a barbarian and by a Greek. In passing through the marsh lands, several battalions were lost in the shifting sands; and on arriving at Pelusium, the enemy was found ready. Nectanebo had fewer men than his adversary, his force consisting of sixty thousand Egyptians, twenty thousand Libyans, and as many Greeks, but the recollection of his own successes and those of his predecessors, in spite of unequal numbers, inspired him with courage in the issue of the struggle. His squadron was likewise unequal to the combined fleets of Cyprus and Phœnicia, but he had sufficient flat-bottomed boats to defend the mouths of the Nile. The weak points of his position were defended by fortresses or entrenched camps; in short, all measures were taken for a defensive war.
The imprudent ardour of his Greek auxiliaries, however, spoiled his plan. Pelusium was occupied by five thousand men, under the command of Philophron. Some of the Thebans, who had served under Lacrates in the Persian army, desirous of again justifying their renown for bravery gained in the campaigns of Epaminondas, crossed a deep canal, which separated them from the town, and provoked the garrison to an encounter in the open field. Philophron accepted the challenge, and disputed the victory till nightfall. The following day Lacrates, having bridged the canal with a dike, led his company to the attack, and began storming the town. In a few days a breach was made, but the Egyptians, being as clever in the use of the pickaxe as the sword, built a new wall crowned with towers, whilst the old one was being demolished. Nectanebo, accompanied by thirty thousand native soldiers, five thousand Greeks, and half of the Libyan contingent, followed the course of the siege from a distance; and his presence prevented the Persians from approaching nearer.
Weeks elapsed, and it seemed that the tactics of temporisation would have their usual result, when an unforeseen incident complicated the situation. Among the chiefs of companies who fought under Ochus, there was a certain Nicostratus from Argos, whose personal strength likened him to Hercules, and who, like the traditional hero, was equipped with a lion’s skin and a club.
In imitation, doubtless, of the plan formerly proposed by Iphicrates to Pharnabazus, Nicostratus forced some peasants, whose wives and children were in his power, to guide him to one of the mouths of the Nile, which had been left unfortified, and there he landed his body of troops, and fortified himself in the rear of Nectanebo. The enterprise, undertaken with too few men, was more than rash, and if the mercenaries had contented themselves with harassing Nicostratus, without coming to an open battle, they would have forced him to re-embark or surrender. But their impatience spoilt everything, for the five thousand men forming the garrison of the neighbouring town marched under Clinias of Cos against the Argive and were beaten. The breach was at last made and the Persians, encouraged by the success of Nicostratus, ran the risk of being separated from the troops on the eastern frontier and utterly destroyed, for he had turned back to the Delta. Whilst he was trying to muster a fresh army at Memphis, Pelusium surrendered to Lacrates; Mentor took possession of Bubastis, and the strongest cities fearing the same fate as Sidon opened their gates almost without resistance.
Nectanebo, in despair at these successive defections, fled to Ethiopia with his treasures, and the successful coup de main of Nicostratus re-established the empire of the Great King.
Egypt had certainly prospered under the administration of her latter indigenous kings. From the reign of Amyrtæus to that of Nectanebo, the sovereigns had conscientiously worked to efface the traces of the foreign invasions and to restore the kingdom to its old prosperity. The two capitals Thebes and Memphis, were not forgotten, and the cities of the Delta, Sebennytus, Bubastis, and Pithom were also embellished. And in spite of the short time given to the work, the majority of these works bear no trace of haste or carelessness; and the artists being quite conversant with the methods of ancient art, knew how to produce chefs d’œuvre comparable to those of the Saïtic period.
But now the victory of Ochus was a more fatal blow to Egypt than the invasion of Cambyses had been. Ochus had personal feelings of hate against his new subjects, and he has been compared to Typhon for cruelty, and he was dubbed an ass, because it is the animal consecrated to the god of evil.
Arrived at Memphis, he gave orders for the Apis bull to be roasted for a banquet, and he enthroned and worshipped an ass in the temple of Ptah.
The goat of Mendes shared the fate of Apis, the temples were sacked, the sacred books carried off to Persia, the walls of the city razed to the ground, and the chief partisans of the indigenous royalty were massacred.
When these acts were over, the Greek mercenaries returned to their country, laden with booty, and the Great King returned to Susa, leaving the reconquered satrapy in charge of Pherendates. The success of the expedition had been mainly due to the eunuch Bagoas and Mentor the Rhodian; and to them Ochus entrusted the government of the empire. Bagoas directed the politics of the interior, and Mentor, placed at the head of the maritime provinces, soon reduced them to order.
Artabazus retired from the struggle and sought refuge with Philip of Macedon. Some tyrants on the coast of the Ægean Sea willingly submitted to the new dominion, and others resisting, like Hermias of Atarneus, the friend of Aristotle, were seized and put to death.
Thus Persia in a few years seemed to regain the widespread power which she had lost since the accession of Artaxerxes II, and Ochus ranked as high in the minds of his contemporaries as her great conquerors, Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius. But Ochus himself was only an oriental despot of the common type. His empire still had the appearance of strength, but the races, strangers to each other, and with difficulty suppressed by the satraps, inclined more and more to detachment from him, and already some of the governments of the previous century only existed in name. In the north towards the sources of the Euphrates, Tigris, and Halys, there was nothing but a confused mass of kingdoms and tribes, of which some like the Armenians still recognised the suzerainty of the Persians, and others, like the Chalybes and the Tibareni retained their independence. The kings of Bithynia, Paphlagonia, and Pontus still paid tribute in an intermittent fashion; but the Mysians, Pisidians, Lycaonians, had ceased payment. The countries beyond the Tigris were in the same disorder. The Cadusians, the Amardians, and the Tapuri, protected by the mountains of the Caspian Sea, withstood every effort to dislodge them. India and the Sacæ had passed from the state of subjects to that of friendly allies, and the savage hordes of Gedrosia and Paropamisus rebelled against all authority. During the dismemberment of the empire the order of administration, so cleverly organised by Darius, was broken by the feebleness of his mercenaries. Not only had the custom of annually sending inspectors to the provinces become a mere formality, which was often omitted, but the distinction between the civil and military power had disappeared. The officer who commanded the troops nearly always filled the post of governor and united several satrapies under one rule.