d 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 wa