Free to choose whom she would, Gyptis rose from the table, filled a cup, and made the circuit of the board. Every eye was fixed on her; he was to be her choice to whom she offered the bowl. She did not hesitate for a moment, she went to the Greek stranger and extended it to him. Protis put the goblet to his lips, and the alliance was concluded.
The example of Gyptis was followed by some of her maidens. The Gauls agreed to receive the Greeks, and suffer them to colonise the basin of Marseilles.
But the chiefs who had been set aside by the fair Gyptis bore a grudge against the new-comers. The growing prosperity and rapid development of the new settlement aroused their jealousy, which was probably augmented by the defection of some of their wives and daughters. Profiting by the Feast of Flora in May, they presented themselves at the gates of Marseilles in attendance on some waggons laden with green boughs, under which were their arms concealed. But love, that had founded the Ionian colony, was destined to save it. A young Gaulish woman revealed the plot to her Hellenic lover, and the Greeks laid their hands on the arms that were to have been employed against them, turned them against the intrusive Gauls, and massacred them to a man.
But having thus saved themselves from one danger they felt that they had incurred another. They had provoked the deadly animosity of the whole tribe of the Segobrigæ. They therefore appealed to their countrymen in Ionia to come to their aid. The appeal met with a ready response, a second fleet of colonists arrived. Marseilles was encompassed with walls on the land side, and thus made secure against the assaults of undisciplined barbarians.
Such is the graceful legend of the origin of Marseilles. It is only so far historical that it gives us in poetic and romantic form the main facts, that the first colony settled at Marseilles without opposition, that after a while it got embroiled with the Gaulish tribes of the neighbourhood, and that a second Ionian colony came to strengthen the first. But this second colony arrived B.C. 542, fifty-seven years after the first, and was due to the taking of Phocæa by the Medes and Persians.
As a Greek mercantile colony Marseilles flourished, and sent forth other colonies, that formed settlements along the Ligurian coast, as a Literal crown from Ampurias and Rhodé in Catalonia to the confines of Etruria. Free, rich, protected by the Roman legions, these Greek settlements cultivated the arts and sciences with ardour, as well as carrying on the trade of the Mediterranean.
In the year B.C. 350 two of her most illustrious citizens, Pytheas and Euthymenes, explored the northern and southern Atlantic. Pytheas was charged to make a voyage of discovery towards the north. He coasted Spain, Portugal, Aquitania, Brittany, discovered Great Britain, coasted it, and reached Thule, which some have supposed to be Iceland, but others the Orkney Isles. In a second voyage he penetrated the Baltic by the Cattegat and Sound, and reached the mouths of the Dwina or the Vistula. On his return he composed two works, records of his discoveries, of which precious fragments have been preserved by Pliny and Strabo. Thanks to his labours, Marseilles was the first town whose latitude was determined with some precision.
About the same time, Euthymenes was commissioned to make explorations in the opposite direction. He sailed south-west, traced the western coast of Africa, and penetrated the mouths of the Senegal, whence he brought back gold dust.
Marseilles was taken, B.C. 49, by Trebonius, the lieutenant of Julius Cæsar. Two naval battles ruined her fleet; and, but for the clemency of Cæsar, the doom of the city would have been sealed. She had enthusiastically taken the part of Pompey, and had resisted Cæsar with unusual determination. But he appreciated the importance of the colony and the mercantile energy of her inhabitants, and he did not lay his hand in retribution too severely upon her.
[Illustration: Ancient Massilia.]