But on broaching this plan to the leaders of the fleet he was met with a determined opposition.

The Phoenicians positively refused to proceed against their own colonists.

They urged that they were bound to the Carthaginians by most solemn oaths, and that it would be as wicked and unnatural for them to execute the king's orders as for parents to destroy their own children.[14263] It was a bold act to run counter to the will of a despotic monarch, especially of one so headstrong and impetuous as Cambyses.

But the Phoenicians were firm, and the monarch yielded.

"He did not like," Herodotus says, "to force the war upon the Phoenicians, because they had surrendered themselves to the Persians, and because on the Phoenicians his entire sea-service depended." He therefore allowed their opposition to prevail, and desisted from his proposed undertaking.[14264] This acquiescence in their wishes on the part of the Great King, and his abstinence from any attempt at compulsion, would seem to have paved the way for that thoroughly good understanding between the suzerain power and her dependency which characterises the relations of the two for the next century and a half, with the single exception of one short interval.