Though Artaxerxes, entertaining general suspicions of his brother’s ambitious views, had sent down various persons to watch him, yet Cyrus had contrived to gain or neutralize these spies, and had masked his preparations so skilfully, that no intimation was conveyed to Susa until the march was about to commence. It was only then that Tissaphernes, seeing the siege of Miletus relinquished, and the vast force mustering at Sardis, divined that something more was meant than the mere conquest of Pisidian freebooters, and went up in person to warn the king; who began his preparations forthwith.[35] That which Tissaphernes had divined was yet a secret to every man in the army, to Proxenus as well as the rest,—when Cyrus, having confided the provisional management of his satrapy to some Persian kinsmen, and to his admiral the Egyptian Tamos, commenced his march in a south-easterly direction from Sardis, through Lydia and Phrygia.[36] Three days’ march, a distance stated at twenty-two parasangs,[37] brought him to the Mæander; one additional march of eight parasangs, after crossing that river, forwarded him to Kolossæ, a flourishing city in Phrygia, where Menon overtook him with a reinforcement of one thousand hoplites, and five hundred peltasts,—Dolopes, Ænianes, and Olynthians. He then marched three days onward to Kelænæ, another Phrygian city, “great and flourishing,” with a citadel very strong both by nature and art. Here he halted no less than thirty days, in order to await the arrival of Klearchus, with his division of one thousand hoplites, eight hundred Thracian peltasts, and two hundred Kretan bowmen; at the same time Sophænetus arrived with one thousand farther hoplites, and Sosias with three hundred. This total of Greeks was reviewed by Cyrus in one united body at Kelænæ; eleven thousand hoplites and two thousand peltasts.[38] [35] Xen. Anab. i, 2, 4; ii, 3, 19. Diodorus (xiv, 11) citing from Ephorus affirms that the first revelation to Artaxerxes was made by Pharnabazus, who had learnt it from the acuteness of the Athenian exile Alkibiades. That the latter should have had any concern in it, appears improbable. But Diodorus on more than one occasion, confounds Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes. [36] Diodor. xiv, 19. [37] The parasang was a Persian measurement of length, but according to Strabo, not of uniform value in all parts of Asia; in some parts, held equivalent to thirty stadia, in others to forty, in others to sixty (Strabo, xi, p. 518; Forbiger, Handbuch der Alten Geograph. vol. i, p. 555). This variability of meaning is no way extraordinary, when we recollect the difference between English, Irish, and German miles, etc.