The overwhelming strength of the armament which Ochus had brought with
him into Syria alarmed the chiefs of the rebel confederacy. Tennes,
especially, the Sidonian monarch, despaired of a successful resistance,
and made up his mind that his only chance of safety lay in his appeasing
the anger of Ochus by the betrayal of his confederates and followers. He
opened his designs to Mentor of Rhodes, the commander of the Greek
mercenaries furnished by Egypt, and found him quite ready to come into
his plans. The two in conjunction betrayed Sidon into the hands of
Persia, by the admission of a detachment within the walls; after which
the defence became impracticable. The Sidonians, having experienced the
unrelenting temper and sanguinary spirit of the Persian king, who had
transfixed with javelins six hundred of their principal citizens, came
to the desperate resolution of setting fire to their houses, and so
destroying themselves with their town. One is glad to learn that the
cowardly traitor, Tennes, who had brought about these terrible
calamities, did not derive any profit from them, but was executed by the
command of Ochus, as soon as Sidon had fallen.
The reduction of Sidon was followed closely by the invasion of Egypt.
Ochus, besides his 330,000 Asiatics, had now a force of 14,000 Greeks,
the mercenaries under Mentor having joined him. Marshalling his army in
four divisions, he proceeded to the attack. The first, second, and
third divisions contained, each of them, a contingent of Greeks and a
contingent of Asiatics, commanded respectively by a Greek and a Persian
leader. The Greeks of the first division, consisting mainly of Bœotians,
were under the orders of Lacrates, a Theban of enormous strength, who
regarded himself as a second Hercules, and adopted the traditional
costume of that hero, a lion's skin and a club. His Persian colleague
was Rhosaces, satrap of Ionia and Lydia, who claimed descent from one of
"the Seven" that put down the conspiracy of the Magi. In the second
division, where the Argive mercenaries served, the Greek leader was
Nicostratus, the Persian Aristazanes, a court usher, and one of the most
trusted friends of the king. Mentor and the eunuch Bagoas, Ochus's chief
minister in his later years, were at the head of the third division,
Mentor commanding his own mercenaries, and Bagoas the Greeks whom Ochus
had levied in his own dominions, together with a large body of Asiatics.
The king himself was sole commander of the fourth division, as well as
commander-in-chief of the entire host. Nekht-nebf, on his side, was only
able to oppose to this vast array an army less than one-third of the
size. He had enrolled as many as sixty thousand of the Egyptian warrior
class, and had the services of twenty thousand Greek mercenaries, and of
about the same number of Libyan troops.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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