Cambyses resolved to treat Psammenitus and Egypt in precisely the same way as Cyrus had treated Croesus and Lydia, Nabonetus and Babylon. It is not said that any harm was done to the city of Memphis, and Herodotus tells us himself that if Psammenitus had known how to keep quiet, Cambyses would have entrusted him with the governorship of Egypt. Yet the degradation of his daughter and the execution of his son were a strange initiation of such treatment.[152] Still more incredible is the ill-treatment and burning of the corpse of Amasis, for which Cambyses had not the slightest reason, especially as Herodotus states that Cambyses sent Ladice, the widow of Amasis, unharmed back to her own city of Cyrene.[153] The story belongs to the context of the narrative according to which Cambyses sues for the daughter of Amasis, and is deceived by him with the daughter of Hophra, whose desire for vengeance on Amasis he satisfies. As Amasis is no longer alive, vengeance comes upon his son and grandson, and even on his own body. For this reason Herodotus has adopted this story, for he lays great stress on the fact that no misfortune befell Amasis in his life, though he rejects the Egyptian version that Amasis had taken the precaution to substitute the corpse of another person of the same age for his own. If Sais resisted and was taken by storm, the temple of Neith might certainly be injured, the royal sepulchres violated, and the mummies taken from them, without any blame attaching to Cambyses, though on a similar occasion at Memphis he is charged by Herodotus with opening the tombs and disturbing the rest of the dead.[154] The Egyptian inscription informs us that the conduct of Cambyses at Sais and in the temple of Neith, in the portico of which Amasis had built his sepulchre, was widely different from that described by the legend. He removed his soldiers from the temple, purified it, and both here and in other places he showed his regard for the worship of the Egyptians as Cyrus had shown it for the worship of the Babylonians and the Hebrews. From the account of Herodotus, no less than from the later circumstances of Egypt, it is clear that no alteration was made in the government, law, and administration of justice, except that a Persian satrap was placed at the head of the country and Persian garrisons were sent to the citadels of the most important places. Even the Egyptian warrior caste remained unchanged and undiminished; it merely passed from the service of the Pharaohs into that of the Achæmenids; and after repeated rebellions numbered more than 400,000 men in the middle of the fifth century B.C. FOOTNOTES: