* Herodotus laid the blame for the breach of the treaty to the King of Egypt, and attributed to his fear of the constant good fortune of Polycrates.  The lattor’s accession to power is fixed at about the year 540 by some, by others in the year 537, or in the year 533-2; his negotiations with Amasis must be placed somewhere during the last fifteen years of the Pharaoh.

He made a treaty with the Persian king, and sent a squadron of forty galleys to join the fleet then being equipped in the Phoenician ports.*

     * Herodotus records two opposing traditions:  one that the
     Samians joined in the Egyptian campaign, the other that they
     went only as far as the neighbourhood of Karpathos.

Amasis, therefore, when war at last broke out, found himself left to face the enemy alone.  The struggle was inevitable, and all the inhabitants of the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean had long foreseen its coming.  Without taking into consideration the danger to which the Persian empire and its Syrian provinces were exposed by the proximity of a strong and able power such as Egypt, the hardy and warlike character of Cambyses would naturally have prompted him to make an attempt to achieve what his predecessors, the warrior-kings of Nineveh and Babylon, had always failed to accomplish successfully.  Policy ruled his line of action, and was sufficient to explain it, but popular imagination sought other than the very natural causes which had brought the most ancient and most recent of the great empires of the world into opposition; romantic reasons were therefore invented to account for the great drama which was being enacted, and the details supplied varied considerably, according as the tradition was current in Asia or Africa.  It was said that a physician lent to Cyrus by Amasis, to treat him for an affection of the eyes, was the cause of all the evil.  The unfortunate man, detained at Susa and chafing at his exile, was said to have advised Cambyses to ask for the daughter of Pharaoh in marriage, hoping either that Amasis would grant the request, and be dishonoured in the eyes of his subjects for having degraded the solar race by a union with a barbarian, or that he would boldly refuse, and thus arouse the hatred of the Persians against himself.  Amasis, after a slight hesitation, substituted Nitetis, a daughter of Apries, for his own child.  It happened that one day in sport Cambyses addressed the princess by the name of her supposed father, whereupon she said, “I perceive, O king, that you have no suspicion of the way in which you have been deceived by Amasis; he took me, and having dressed me up as his own daughter, sent me to you.  In reality I am the daughter of Apries, who was his lord and master until the day that he revolted, and, in concert with the rest of the Egyptians, put his sovereign to death.”  The deceit which Cambyses thus discovered had been put upon him irritated him so greatly