with him as keenly as if he had been successful before Pelusium.  Antalcidas reappeared at Susa in 372 B.C. to procure a fresh act of intervention; Pelopidas and Ismenias, in 367, begged for a rescript similar to that of Antalcidas; and finally Athens sent a solemn embassy to entreat for a subsidy.  It seemed as if the great king had become a kind of supreme arbiter for Greece, and that all the states hitherto leagued against him now came in turn to submit their mutual differences for his decision.  But this arbiter who thus imposed his will on states beyond the borders of his empire was never fully master within his own domains.  Of gentle nature and pliant disposition, inclined to clemency rather than to severity, and, moreover, so lacking in judgment as a general that he had almost succumbed to an attack by the Cadusians on the only occasion that he had, in a whim of the moment, undertaken the command of an army in person, Artaxerxes busied himself with greater zeal in religious reforms than in military projects.  He introduced the rites of Mithra and Anahita into the established religion of the state, but he had not the energy necessary to curb the ambitions of his provincial governors.  Asia Minor, whose revolts followed closely on those of Egypt, rose in rebellion against him immediately after the campaign on the Nile, Ariobarzanes heading the rebellion in Phrygia, Datames and Aspis that in Cilicia and Cappadocia, and both defying his power for several years.  When at length they succumbed through treachery, the satraps of the Mediterranean district, from the Hellespont to the isthmus of Suez, formed a coalition and simultaneously took the field:  the break-up of the empire would have been complete had not Persian darics been lavishly employed once more in the affair.  Meanwhile Nectanebo had died in 361,* and had been succeeded by Tachos.**

* The lists of Manetho assign ten or eighteen years to his reign.  A sarcophagus in Vienna bears the date of his fifteenth year, and the great inscription of Edfu speaks of gifts he made to the temple in this town in the eighteenth year of his reign.  The reading eighteen is therefore preferable to the reading ten in the lists of Manetho; if the very obscure text of the Demotic Rhapsody really applies the number nine or ten to the length of the reign, this reckoning must be explained by some mystic calculations of the priests of the Ptolemaic epoch.

** The name of this king, written by the Greeks Teos or Tachos, in accordance with the pronunciation of different Egyptian dialects, has been discovered in hieroglyphic writing on the external wall of the temple of Khonsu at Karnak.

The new Pharaoh deemed the occasion opportune to make a diversion against Persia and to further secure his own safety:  he therefore offered his support to the satraps, who sent Eheomitres as a delegate to discuss the terms of an offensive and defensive alliance.  Having inherited from Nectanebo a large