In the other civilized countries the old passion for freedom had been completely obliterated; and after the days of Darius I.— apart from the Greek, Lycian and Phoenician towns—not a single people in all these provinces dreamed of shaking off the foreign dominion. All the more clearly, then, was the inner weakness of the empire revealed by the revolts of the satraps. These were facilitated by the custom—quite contrary to the original imperial organization—which entrusted the provincial military commands to the satraps, who began to receive great masses of Greek mer cenaries into their service. Under Artaxerxes I. and Darius II., these insurrections were still rare. But when the revolt of the younger Cyrus against his brother (401 B.c.) had demonstrated the surprising ease and rapidity with which a courageous army could penetrate into the heart of the empire—when the whole force of that empire had proved powerless, not only to prevent some 12,000 Greek troops, completely surrounded, cut off from their communications, and deprived through treachery of their leaders, from escaping to the coast, but even to make a serious attack on them—then, indeed, the imperial impotence became manifest.
After that, revolts of the satraps in Asia Minor and Syria were of everyday occurrence, and the task of suppressing them was com plicated by the foreign wars which the empire had to sustain against Greece and Egypt.
At this very period, however, the foreign policy of the empire gained a brilliant success. The collapse of the Athenian power before Syracuse (413 B.c.) induced Darius II. to order his satraps Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, in Asia Minor, to collect the tribute overdue from the Greek cities. In alliance with Sparta (see PELOPONNESIAN WAR), Persia intervened in the conflict against Athens, and it was Persian gold that made it possible for Lysander to complete her overthrow (404 B.c.). True, war with Sparta followed immediately, over the division of the spoils, and the campaigns of the Spartan generals in Asia Minor (399-395) were all the more dangerous as they gave occasion to numerous rebellions. But Persia joined the Greek league against Sparta, and in 394 Pharnabazus and Conon annihilated the Lacedaemonian fleet at Cnidus. Thus the Spartan power of offence was crippled; and the upshot of the long-protracted war was that Sparta rue fully returned to the Persian alliance, and by the Peace of Antal cidas (q.v.), concluded with the king in 387 B.C., not only re nounced all claims to the Asiatic possessions, but officially pro claimed the Persian suzerainty over Greece. Ninety years after Salamis and Plataea, the goal for which Xerxes had striven was actually attained, and the king's will was law in Greece. In the following decades, no Hellenic state ventured to violate the king's peace, and all the feuds that followed centred round the efforts of the combatants—Sparta, Thebes, Athens and Argos—to draw the royal powers to their side (see GREECE: Ancient History).
But, for these successes, the empire had to thank the internecine strife of its Greek opponents, rather than its own strength. Its feebleness, when thrown on its own resources, is evident from the fact that, during the next years, it failed both to reconquer Egypt and to suppress completely King Evagoras of Salamis in Cyprus. The satrap revolts, moreover, assumed more and more formidable proportions, and the Greek states began once more to tamper with them. Thus the reign of Artaxerxes II. ended, in 359 B.C., with a complete dissolution of the imperial authority in the west. His successor, Artaxerxes Ochus, succeeded yet again in restoring the empire in its full extent. In 355 B.C., he spoke the fatal word, which, a second—or rather a third—time demolished the essen tially unsound power of Athens. In 342 he reduced Egypt, and his generals Mentor and Memnon, with his vizier Bagoas (q.v.), crushed once and for all the resistance in Asia Minor. At his death in 338, immediately before the final catastrophe, the empire to all appearances was more powerful and more firmly established than it had been since the days of Xerxes.
Progress of Greek Influence. — These successes were won only by means of Greek armies and Greek generals. And simultaneously the Greek civilization—diffused by mercenaries, traders, artists, prostitutes and slaves,—advanced in ever greater force. In Asia Minor and Phoenicia we can clearly trace the progress of Hellenism (q.v.), especially by the coinage. The stamp is cut by Greek hands and the Greek tongue predominates more and more in the inscription. We can see that the victory of Greek civilization had long been prepared on every side. But the vital point is that the absolute superiority of the Hellene was recognized as incontestable on both hands. The Persian sought to protect himself against danger by employing Greeks in the national service and turning Greek policy to the interests of the empire. In the Greek world itself the disgrace that a people, called to universal dominion and capable of wielding it, should be dependent on the mandate of an impotent Asiatic monarchy, was keenly felt by all who were not yet absorbed in the rivalry of city with city. The spokesman of this national sentiment was Isocrates ; but numerous other writers gave expression to it, notably, the historian Callis thenes of Olynthus. Union between Greeks, voluntary or compul sory, and an offensive war against Persia, was the programme they propounded.