Artabazos I of Phrygia

Artabazus, however, had refrained from engaging his troops at the Battle of Plataea, and thus managed to lead the remnant portion of a greatly reduced Achaemenid army out of Greece and back to Ionia.

When Xerxes I was assassinated in 465 BC, he was succeeded by his son Artaxerxes I, but several parts of the Achaemenid empire soon revolted, foremost of which were Bactria and Egypt.

He contacted the Greeks, who were also officially still at war with Persia, and in 460 BC, Athens sent an expeditionary force of 200 ships and 6,000 heavy infantry to support Inarus.

[7] Diodorus has more or less the same story, with more detail; after the attempt at bribery failed, Artaxerxes put Megabyzus and Artabazus in charge of 300,000 men, with instructions to quell the revolt.

They went first from Persia to Cilicia and gathered a fleet of 300 triremes from the Cilicians, Phoenicians and Cypriots, and spent a year training their men.

[8] Modern estimates, however, place the number of Persian troops at the considerably lower figure of 25,000 men given that it would have been highly impractical to deprive the already strained satrapies of any more man power than that.

[9] Thucydides does not mention Artabazus, who is reported by Herodotus to have taken part in the second Persian invasion; Diodorus may be mistaken about his presence in this campaign.

[10] It is clearly possible that the Persian forces did spend some prolonged time in training, since it took four years for them to respond to the Egyptian victory at Papremis.

The Persians, not wanting to sustain heavy casualties in attacking the Athenians, instead allowed them to depart freely to Cyrene, whence they returned to Athens.