But the rebellion must have been practically crushed. No Greek could have ventured into Persian territory while his countrymen were fighting against its Persian masters. The army of Megabyzos must have done its work, and the Athenian fleet been utterly destroyed. Moreover, it is evident that when Herodotos entered the valley of the Nile the country was at peace. His references to the war are to a past event, and when he speaks of Inarôs and Amyrtæos it is of men who have ceased to be a danger to the foreign government. The passage, indeed, in which he notices the peaceable appointment of their sons to the principalities of their fathers may have been inserted after his return to Greek lands, but this makes no difference as to the main fact. When he came to Egypt it had again lapsed into tranquil submission to the Persian power. In B.C. 450, Kimon, the son of Miltiades, had destroyed the naval power of Persia, and in the following year Megabyzos was overthrown at Salamis. It was then that the “peace of Kimon” is said to have been concluded between Athens and the Persian king, which put an end to the long Persian war, freed the Greek cities of Asia, and made the Mediterranean a Greek sea. The reality of the peace has been doubted, because there is no allusion to it in the pages of Thucydides, and it may be that it was never formally drawn up. But the fact embodied by the story remains: for many years to come there was truce between Greece and Persia, and the independence of the Greek colonies in Asia Minor was acknowledged at the Persian court. The year 449 marks the final triumph of Athens and the beginning of Persian decline. Had Herodotos travelled in Egypt a year or two later, the ease and security with which he did so would be readily explained. But in this case we should be brought too near the time when his history was finished and he himself was a resident in Italy. We must therefore believe that he was there before the final blow had been struck at Persian supremacy in the Mediterranean, but when the Athenian invasion of Egypt was already a thing of the past, and the unarmed trader and tourist were once more able to move freely about.