The Nile rose as the summer drew on, and flooded most of the Delta; the expedition could effect nothing, and had to return.

Pharnabazus and Iphicrates parted amid mutual recriminations; and the reduction of Egypt was deferred for above a quarter of a century.
In Greece, however, the Great King still retained that position of supreme arbiter with which he had been invested at the "Peace of Antalcidas." In B.C.372 Antalcidas was sent by Sparta a second time up to Susa, for the purpose of obtaining an imperial rescript, prescribing the terms on which the then existing hostilities among the Greeks should cease.

In B.C.367 Pelopidas and Ismenias proceeded with the same object from Thebes to the Persian capital.

In the following year a rescript, more in their favor than former ones, was obtained by Athens.

Thus every one of the leading powers of Greece applied in turn to the Great King for his royal mandate, so erecting him by common consent into a sort of superior, whose decision was to be final in all cases of Greek quarrel.
But this external acknowledgment of the imperial greatness of Persia did not, and could not, check the internal decay and tendency to disintegration, which was gradually gaining head, and threatening the speedy dissolution of the Empire.