On a subsequent occasion, too, we hear of the Phenician fleet as intended to be augmented to a total of three hundred sail (Xenoph. Hellen. iii, 4, 1). It seems to have been the sort of standing number for a fleet worthy of the Persian king. Presently arrived the Athenian Alkibiadês, with thirteen Athenian triremes, exhibiting himself as on the best terms with the satrap. He too had made use of this approaching Phenician fleet to delude his countrymen at Samos, by promising to go and meet Tissaphernês at Aspendus, and to determine him, if possible, to send the fleet to the assistance of Athens, but at the very least, _not_ to send it to the aid of Sparta. The latter alternative of the promise was sufficiently safe, for he knew well that Tissaphernês had no intention of applying the fleet to any really efficient purpose. But he was thereby enabled to take credit with his countrymen for having been the means of diverting this formidable reinforcement from the enemy. Partly the apparent confidence between Tissaphernês and Alkibiadês, partly the impudent shifts of the former, grounded on the incredible pretence that the fleet was insufficient in number, at length satisfied Philippus that the present was only a new manifestation of deceit. After a long and vexatious interval, he apprized Mindarus—not without indignant abuse of the satrap—that nothing was to be hoped from the fleet at Aspendus. Yet the proceeding of Tissaphernês, indeed, in bringing up the Phenicians to that place, and still withholding the order for farther advance and action, was in every one’s eyes mysterious and unaccountable. Some fancied that he did it with a view of levying larger bribes from the Phenicians themselves, as a premium for being sent home without fighting, as it appears that they actually were. But Thucydidês supposes that he had no other motive than that which had determined his behavior during the last year, to protract the war and impoverish both Athens and Sparta, by setting up a fresh deception, which would last for some weeks, and thus procure so much delay.[144] The historian is doubtless right: but without his assurance, it would have been difficult to believe, that the maintenance of a fraudulent pretence, for so inconsiderable a time, should have been held as an adequate motive for bringing this large fleet from Phenicia to Aspendus, and then sending it away unemployed. [144] Thucyd. viii, 87, 88, 99.