One is yet another Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, when telling of the preparations made by the Persian monarch Artaxerxes II toward subordinating Egypt: "The Persian army gathered at the city of Ake, numbering two hundred thousand barbarians led by
Pharnabazus, and twenty thousand Greek mercenaries under the command of Iphicrates.
(47) Greek sources frequently reiterate this detail of transportable female purdah: Xenophon, for instance, recalls that Mania, the extraordinary female governor of Dardanus, a dependant of the satrap
Pharnabazus, watched and commanded battles from the purdah of her curtained litter (Hell.
(29) Indeed, Greek attitudes to the Persians were certainly not consistently hostile from 479 down to Alexander's day: an example of Greek willingness to treat Persians on individual merit appears in Xenophon's account of the exchange between Agesilaus and
Pharnabazus (Hellenica 4.1.
(7.) Lossau (1990, 51) notes that the Anabasis relates a journey that begins and ends in the vicinity of Sardis, and the last words of the book, "Thibron...went to war against Tissaphernes and
Pharnabazus" (7.8.24), recall the pretext of making war against Tissaphernes that Cyrus used to collect his army at the very beginning of the work (1.1.6).
In 379
Pharnabazus informed the Athenians that if they did not summon back Chabrias, who was serving as a private mercenary commander for the Egyptian king Achoris against Persia, they risked losing Persia's favour:(7) they recalled their citizen, and further bowed to the demand that they send Iphicrates out to act as a general for the Persian forces.
Indeed, if De Sanctis is correct in his suggestion that Polyaenus' sources were the Hellenika Oxyrhynchia and Theopompus we perhaps have further support for this hypothesis: of the two remarkable details in Polyaenus' account (
Pharnabazus and the universal success of the bribe) one is found elsewhere only in the Hellenika Oxyrhynchia, the other only in Pausanias.(64)