A time of comparative tranquillity seems to have followed the Cadusian campaign.  Artaxerxes strengthened his hold upon the Asiatic Greeks by razing some of their towns and placing garrisons in others.  His satraps even ventured to commence the absorption of the islands off the coast; and there is evidence that Sanaos, at any rate, was reduced and added to the Empire.  Cilicia, Phoenicia, and Idumaea were doubtless recovered soon after the great defeat of Evagoras.  There remained only one province in this quarter which still maintained its revolt, and enjoyed, under native monarchs, the advantages of independence.  This was Egypt, which had now continued free for above thirty years, since it shook off the yoke of Darius Nothus.  Artaxerxes, anxious to recover this portion of his ancestral dominions, applied in B.C. 375 to Athens for the services of her great general, Iphicrates.  His request was granted, and in the next year a vast armament was assembled at Acre under Iphicrates and Pharnabazus, which effected a successful landing in the Delta at the Mendesian mouth of the Nile, stormed the town commanding this branch of the river, and might have taken Memphis, could the energetic advice of the Athenian have stirred to action the sluggish temper of his Persian colleague.  But Pharnabazus declined to be hurried, and preferred to proceed leisurely and according to rule.  The result was that the season for hostilities passed and nothing had been done.  The Nile rose as the summer drew on, and flooded most of the Delta; the expedition could effect nothing, and had to return.  Pharnabazus and Iphicrates parted amid mutual recriminations; and the reduction of Egypt was deferred for above a quarter of a century.

In Greece, however, the Great King still retained that position of supreme arbiter with which he had been invested at the “Peace of Antalcidas.”  In B.C. 372 Antalcidas was sent by Sparta a second time up to Susa, for the purpose of obtaining an imperial rescript, prescribing the terms on which the then existing hostilities among the Greeks should cease.  In B.C. 367 Pelopidas and Ismenias proceeded with the same object from Thebes to the Persian capital.  In the following year a rescript, more in their favor than former ones, was obtained by Athens.  Thus every one of the leading powers of Greece applied in turn to the Great King for his royal mandate, so erecting him by common consent into a sort of superior, whose decision was to be final in all cases of Greek quarrel.

But this external acknowledgment of the imperial greatness of Persia did not, and could not, check the internal decay and tendency to disintegration, which was gradually gaining head, and threatening the speedy dissolution of the Empire.  The long reign of Artaxerxes Mnemon was now verging towards its close.  He was advanced in years, and enfeebled in mind and body, suspicious of his sons and of his nobles, especially of such as showed more than common ability.  Under these