was withdrawn from Gaul, and the only important sign it preserved of their residence was a road which, starting from the eastern Pyrenees, skirted the Gallic portion of the Mediterranean, crossed the Alps by the pass of Tenda, and so united Spain, Gaul, and Italy. After the withdrawal of the Phoenicians this road was kept up and repaired, at first by the Greeks of Marseilles, and subsequently by the Romans.
As merchants and colonists, the Greeks were, in Gaul, the successors of the Phoenicians, and Marseilles was one of their first and most considerable colonies. At the time of the Phoenicians’ decay in Gaul, a Greek people, the Rhodians, had pushed their commercial enterprises to a great distance, and, in the words of the ancient historians, held the empire of the sea. Their ancestors had, in former times, succeeded the Phoenicians in the island of Rhodes, and they likewise succeeded them in the south of Gaul, and founded, at the mouth of the Rhone, a colony called Rhodanusia or Rhoda, with the same name as that which they had already founded on the north-east coast of Spain, and which is nowadays the town of Rosas, in Catalonia. But the importance of the Rhodians on the southern coast of Gaul was short-lived. It had already sunk very low in the year 600 B.C., when Euxenes, a Greek trader, coming from Phocea, an Ionian town of Asia Minor, to seek his fortune, landed from a bay eastward of the Rhone. The Segobrigians, a tribe of the Gallic race, were in occupation of the neighboring country. Nann, their chief, gave the strangers kindly welcome, and took them home with him to a great feast which he was giving for his daughter’s marriage, who was called Gyptis, according to some, and Petta, according to other historians. A custom which exists still in several cantons of the Basque country, and even at the centre of France in Morvan, a mountainous district of the department of the Nievre, would that the maiden should appear only at the end of the banquet, and holding in her hand a filled wine-cup, and that the guest to whom she should present it should become the husband of her choice. By accident, or quite another cause, say the ancient legends, Gyptis stopped opposite Euxenes, and handed him the cup. Great was the surprise, and, probably, anger amongst the Gauls who were present. But Nann, believing he recognized a commandment from his gods, accepted the Phocean as his son-in-law, and gave him as dowry the bay where he had landed, with some cantons of the territory around. Euxenes, in gratitude, gave his wife the Greek name of Aristoxena (that is, “the best of hostesses”), sent away his ship to Phocea for colonists, and, whilst waiting for them, laid in the centre of the bay, on a peninsula hollowed out harbor-wise, towards the south, the foundations of a town, which he called Massilia—thence Marseilles.
Scarcely a year had elapsed when Euxenes’ ship arrived from Phocea, and with it several galleys, bringing colonists full of hope, and laden with provisions, utensils, arms, seeds, vine-cuttings, and olive-cuttings, and, moreover, a statue of Diana, which the colonists had gone to fetch from the celebrated temple of that goddess at Ephesus, and which her priestess, Aristarche, accompanied to its new country.
The activity and prosperity of Marseilles, both within and without, were rapidly developed. She carried her commerce wherever the Phoenicians and the Rhodians had marked out a road; she repaired their forts; she took to herself their establishments; and she placed on her medals, to signify dominion, the rose, the emblem of Rhodes, beside the lion of Marseilles. But Nann, the Gallic chieftain, who had protected her infancy, died; and his son, Conran, shared the jealousy felt by the Segobrigians and the neighboring peoplets towards the new corners. He promised and really resolved to destroy the new city. It was the time of the flowering of the vine, a season of great festivity amongst the Ionian Greeks, and Marseilles thought solely of the preparations for the feast. The houses and public places were being decorated with branches and flowers. No guard was set; no work was done. Conran sent into the town a number of his men, some openly, as if to take part in the festivities, others hidden at the bottom of the cars which conveyed into Marseilles the branches and foliage from the outskirts. He himself went and lay in ambush in a neighboring glen, with seven thousand men, they say, but the number is probably exaggerated, and waited for his emissaries to open the gates to him during the night. But once more a woman, a near relation of the Gallic chieftain, was the guardian angel of the Greeks, and revealed the plot to a young man of Marseilles, with whom she was in love. The gates were immediately shut, and so many Segobrigians as happened to be in the town were massacred. Then, when night came on, the inhabitants, armed, went forth to surprise Conran in the ambush where he was awaiting the moment to surprise them. And there he fell with all his men.
Delivered as they were from this danger, the Massilians nevertheless remained in a difficult and disquieting situation. The peoplets around, in coalition against them, attacked them often, and threatened them incessantly. But whilst they were struggling against these embarrassments, a grand disaster, happening in the very same spot whence they had emigrated half a century before, was procuring them a great accession of strength and the surest means of defence. In the year 542 B.C., Phocea succumbed beneath the efforts of Cyrus, King of Persia, and her inhabitants, leaving to the conqueror empty streets and deserted houses, took to their ships in a body, to transfer their homes elsewhere. A portion of this floating population made straight for Marseilles; others stopped at Corsica, in the harbor of Alalia, another Phocean colony. But at the end of five years they too, tired of piratical life and of the incessant wars they had to sustain against the Carthaginians, quitted Corsica, and went to rejoin their compatriots in Gaul.
Thenceforward Marseilles found herself in a position to face her enemies. She extended her walls all round the bay, and her enterprises far away. She founded on the southern coast of Gaul and on the eastern coast of Spain, permanent settlements, which are to this day towns: eastward of the Rhone, Hercules’ harbor, Moncecus (Monaco), Niccea (Nice), Antipolis (Antibes); westward, Heraclea Cacabaria (Saint-Gilles), Agaththae (Agdevall), Emporia; (Ampurias in Catalonia), &c., &c. In valley of the Rhone, several towns of the Gauls, Cabellio were (Cavaili like on), Greek Avenio (Avignon), Arelate (Arles), for instance, colonies, so great there was the number of travellers or established merchants who spoke Greek. With this commercial activity Marseilles united intellectual and scientific activity; her grammarians were among the first to revise and annotate the poems of Homer; and bold travellers from Marseilles, Euthymenes and Pytheas by name, cruised, one along the western coast of Africa beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, and the other the southern and western coasts of Europe, from the mouth of the Tanais (Don), in the Black Sea, to the latitudes and perhaps into the interior of the Baltic. They lived, both of them, in the second half of the fourth century B.C., and they wrote each a Periplus, or tales of their travels, which have unfortunately been almost entirely lost.
But whatever may have been her intelligence and activity, a single town situated at the extremity of Gaul and peopled with foreigners could have but little influence over so vast a country and its inhabitants. At first civilization is very hard and very slow; it requires many centuries, many great events, and many years of toil to overcome the early habits of a people, and cause them to exchange the pleasures, gross indeed, but accompanied with the idleness and freedom of barbarian life, for the toilful advantages of a regulated social condition. By dint of foresight, perseverance, and courage, the merchants of Marseilles and her colonies crossed by two or three main lines the forests, morasses, and heaths through the savage tribes of Gauls, and there effected their exchanges, but to the right and left they penetrated but a short distance. Even on their main lines their traces soon disappeared; and at the commercial settlements which they established here and there they were often far more occupied in self-defence than in spreading their example. Beyond a strip of land of uneven breadth, along the Mediterranean, and save the space peopled towards the south-west by the Iberians, the country, which received its name from the former of the two, was occupied by the Gauls and the Kymrians; by the Gauls in the centre, south-east and east, in the highlands of modern France, between the Alps, the Vosges, the mountains of Auvergne and the Cevennes; by the Kymrians in the north, north-west, and west, in the lowlands, from the western boundary of the Gauls to the ocean.
Whether the Gauls and the Kymrians were originally of the same race, or at least of races closely connected; whether they were both anciently comprised under the general name of Celts; and whether the
