ers, and more and more closely bound to Greece by both
mercantile and friendly ties, had risen to a very high position in the
estimation of its contemporaries; the inhabitants of Elis had deferred
to her decision in the question whether they should take part in the
Olympic games in which they were the judges, and following the advice
she had given on the matter, they had excluded their own citizens from
the sports so as to avoid the least suspicion of partiality in the
distribution of the prizes.* The new king, probably the brother of
the late Pharaoh, had his prenomen of Uahibn from his grandfather
Psammetichus I., and it was this sovereign that the Greeks called
indifferently Uaphres and Apries.**

* Diodorus Siculus has transferred the anecdote to Amasis,
and the decision given is elsewhere attributed to one of the
seven sages. The story is a popular romance, of which
Herodotus gives the version current among the Greeks in
Egypt.

** According to Herodotus, Apries was the son of Psammis.
The size of the sarcophagus of Psammetichus II., suitable
only for a youth, makes this filiation improbable.
Psammetichus, who came to the throne when he was hardly more
than a child, could have left behind him only children of
tender age, and Apries appears from the outset as a prince
of full mental and physical development.

[Illustration: 422.jpg APRIES, FROM A SPHINX IN THE LOUVRE]

Drawn by Boudier, from the bronze statuette in the Louvre
Museum.

He was young, ambitious, greedy of fame and military glory, and longed
to use the weapon that his predecessors had for some fifteen years past
been carefully whetting; his emissaries, arriving at Jerusalem at
the moment when the popular excitement was at its height, had little
difficulty in overcoming Zede-kiah's scruples. Edoni, Moab, and the
Philistines, who had all taken their share in the conferences of the
rebel party, hesitated at the last moment, and refused to sever their
relations with Babylon. Tyre and the Ammonites alone persisted in their
determination, and allied themselves with Egypt on the same terms as
Judah.

[Illustration: 423.jpg STELE OF NEBUCHADREZZAR]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Pognon. The figures
have been carefully defaced with the hammer, but the outline
of the king can still be discerned on the left; he seizes
the rampant lion by the right paw, and