[4] Thucydides's rather compressed version of these events is: "and making themselves masters of the river and two-thirds of Memphis, addressed themselves to the attack of the remaining third, which is called White Castle".

[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.

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.

[12] As a final disastrous coda to the expedition, Thucydides mentions the fate of a squadron of fifty triremes sent to relieve the Siege of Prosopitis.

Unaware that the Athenians had finally succumbed, the fleet put in at the Mendesian mouth of the Nile, where it was promptly attacked from the land, and from the sea by the Phoenician navy.

[13][14] Charitimides was killed in battle and Inarus was wounded in the thigh by the Persian force and retreated to Byblos, his stronghold and the only Egyptian city that did not submit to Megabyzus.

Artaxerxes I initially kept this promise, but after five years of pleading handed Inaros and fifty Greeks to Queen Mother Amestris.

A fragment of Ctesias preserved by Photios I of Constantinople reports that "Inaros was executed on three stakes, fifty of the Greeks, all that she could lay hands on, were decapitated.

He records no truces and Professor J M Bigwood argues that Thucydides should be interpreted as saying that Inaros was both captured and executed in the same year, 454 BC.