Page Content (OCR)
258 was also in disarray religiously, its priests uncertain who to worship, so much so that the leading cult was that of the dead Osiris, the leading deity the female Neith whose title was Mother of God, and the principal “cult object” a bull, the sa- cred Apis Bull, for whom elaborate funerals were held. Cam- byses, too, like his father, was no religious zealot, and let people worship as they pleased; he even (according to an in- scribed stela now in the Vatican museum) learnt the secrets of the worship of Neith and participated in a ceremonial fu- neral of an Apis bull. These religious laissez-faire policies bought the Persians peace in their empire, but not forever. Unrest, uprisings, and rebellions kept breaking out almost everywhere. Especially troublesome were growing commercial, cultural, and reli- gious ties between Egypt and Greece. (Much information about that comes from the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote extensively about Egypt after his visit there circa 460 B.C.E., coinciding with the beginning of Greece’s “golden age.”) The Persians could not be pleased with those ties, above all because Greek mercenaries were participating in the local uprisings. Of particular concern were also the prov- inces in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), at the western tip of which Asia and the Persians faced Europe and the Greeks. There, Greek settlers were reviving and reinforcing olden settlements; the Persians, on their part, sought to ward off the troublesome Europeans by seizing nearby Greek islands. The growing tensions broke into open warfare when the Persians invaded the Greek mainland and were beaten at Marathon in 490 B.c.£.. A Persian invasion by sea was beaten off by the Greeks in the straits of Salamis a decade later, but the skirmishes and battles for control of Asia Minor contin- ued for another century, even as in Persia king followed king and in Greece Athenians, Spartans, and Macedonians fought one another for supremacy. In those double struggles—one among the mainland Greeks, the other with the Persians—the support of the Greek settlers of Asia Minor was very important. No sooner did the Macedonians win the upper hand on the mainland THE END OF DAYS