with the improvements in navigation, the cities on the coast rose in
importance; the navigation of the Red Sea, though always dangerous,
became less dreaded, and Thebes lost the toll on the carrying trade of
the Nile. Wealth alone, however, would not have given the sovereignty
to Lower Egypt, had not the Greek mercenaries been at hand to fight for
those who would pay them. The kings of Saïs had guarded their thrones
with Greek shields; and it was on the rash but praiseworthy attempt
of Amasis to lessen the power of these mercenaries that they joined
Cambyses, and Egypt became a Persian province. In the struggles of the
Egyptians to throw off the Persian yoke, we see little more than the
Athenians and Spartans carrying on their old quarrels on the coasts
and plains of the Delta; and the Athenians, who counted their losses
by ships, not by men, said that in their victories and defeats together
Egypt had cost them two hundred triremes. Hence, when Alexander, by
his successes in Greece, had put a stop to the feuds at home, the
mercenaries of both parties flocked to his conquering standard, and
he found himself on the throne of Upper and Lower Egypt without any
struggle being made against him by the Egyptians. The Greek part of
the population, who had been living in Egypt as foreigners, now found
themselves masters. Egypt became at once a Greek kingdom, as though
the blood and language of the people were changed at the conqueror's
bidding.

Alexander's character as a triumphant general gains little from this
easy conquest of an unwarlike country, and the overthrow of a crumbling
monarchy. But as the founder of a new Macedonian state, and for
reuniting the scattered elements of society in Lower Egypt after the
Persian conquest, in the only form in which a government could be
made to stand, he deserves to be placed among the least mischievous of
conquerors. We trace his march, not by the ruin, misery, and anarchy