Accordingly, the merchants of Marseilles resolved on sending an expedition in quest of this mysterious Hyperborean land, and they engaged the services of Pythias, an eminent mathematician of the city, who had already made himself famous by his measurement of the declination of the ecliptic, and by the calculation of the latitude of Marseilles. At the same time the merchants despatched another expedition to explore the African coast, under the direction of one Euthymes, another scientist of their city. Unhappily, the record of the voyage of this latter is lost; but the diary of Pythias, very carefully kept, has been preserved in part, quoted by early geographers who trusted him, and by Strabo, who poured scorn on his discoveries because they controverted his preconceived theories.
Pythias published his diary in two books, entitled The Circuit of the World and Commentaries concerning the Ocean. From the fragments that remain we can trace his course. Leaving Marseilles, he coasted round Spain to Brittany; from Brittany he struck Kent, and visited other parts of Britain; then from the Thames he travelled to the mouths of the Rhine, passed round Jutland, entered the Baltic, and went to the mouth of the Vistula; thence out of the Baltic and up the coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle; thence he struck west, and reached the Shetlands and the North of Scotland, and coasted round the British Isles till again he reached Armorica; and so to the estuary of the Garonne, whence he journeyed by land to Marseilles.
Pythias remained for some time in Britain, the country to which, as he said, he paid more attention than to any other which he visited in the course of his travels; and he claimed to have investigated all the accessible parts of the Island, and to have traced the eastern side throughout. He arrived in Kent early in the summer, and remained there until harvest time, and he again returned after his voyage to the Arctic Circle. He says that there was plenty of wheat grown in the fields of Britain, but that it was thrashed out in barns, and not on unroofed floors as in the sunny climate of Marseilles. He says that a drink to which the Britons were partial was composed of wheat and honey – in a word, metheglin. It is greatly to be regretted that of this interesting and honestly written diary only scraps remain.6
The old city of Phœnicians and Phocœans occupied that portion of the present town lying between the sea and the ancient port, and the walls cut across from the Anse de la Joliette, mounted the Butte des Carmes and descended to the head of the Vieux-port. The Butte des Moulins was the Acropolis, and on it stood temples of the gods of Carthage and Greece. The sea-face was formerly very different from what it is now. Cæsar speaks of Marseilles being washed by the sea on three sides. The sea has eaten away a very large portion of the peninsula. The cathedral, La Major, was not formerly on the quay; till the end of the eighteenth century its principal portal faced the sea. At the close of that century, so much of the town having been washed away, and so sapped was the rock on that side, that a doorway had to be opened on the landside. An old chapel existing in 1202 stood at a point now 250 feet from the land. Recent works, the formation of a succession of basins, have arrested this degradation of the coast, and have regained some of the lost land.
Marseilles lies in an amphitheatre, but this is only realised when the city is approached from the sea. To those arriving by rail it appears to be a town scattered over a series of hills, very irregular and of a very confused plan. All that portion of the town that lies south of the Vieux-port, about the Palais de Justice to where the hill rises, was formerly morass; the houses here have no cellars, and are built, like Amsterdam, on piles. Above the Bassin de Carinage rises the Church of S. Victor, built in the eleventh and extended in the thirteenth century. The towers and ramparts were erected by William de Grimoard in 1350. He had been prior of the monastery of S. Victor, and afterwards became pope under the name of Urban V. All this portion of rising ground to the south of the old harbour seems to have been the refuge of the first Christians. Excavations made in extending the basin laid bare vestiges of catacombs of a very early period, earlier, in fact, in some cases than the Christian era. In the fourth century the monk Cassian founded a monastery above these catacombs. It was destroyed by the Saracens and rebuilt, and became a vastly wealthy foundation. The monastery on one side of the port, and the cathedral with its appurtenances on the other, were not under the jurisdiction of the municipal authorities of Marseilles; but each had its own town of dependencies under separate government.
What remains of this famous abbey bears an aspect of a citadel rather than of a church. It is an extraordinary jumble of parts, and from without looks as if it were wholly planless.
When, and through whom, Christianity was planted in Marseilles, is unknown; for the tradition of the apostleship there of Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead, must be dismissed as idle fable. The traditional tale is as follows, but there is no earlier authority for it than a legend of the twelfth century, and this is mere religious romance.
When persecution broke out in Jerusalem, Martha, Mary Magdalen, a Bishop Maximin, and a Deacon Parmenas, and Lazarus, took a boat and sailed merrily over the sea till they came to Provence. Maximin settled at Aix. Mary Magdalen retired to the cave La Sainte Beaume, and Martha killed a dragon at Tarascon, and established herself in its lair. Lazarus remained at Marseilles, and became its first bishop.
The first bishop of Marseilles known to history is Orestius, A.D. 314; and not a particle of evidence worth a rush exists to substantiate the story of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, having ever come to Provence.
The street called Cannebière leads to the Vieux-port. Cannebière means a rope-walk, and here were situated the workshops of those who supplied the vessels with cordage and sails. When the old port was being cleaned out, an ancient galley was found at a depth of fifteen feet, built of cedar wood, with coins earlier, contemporary with, and slightly later than Julius Cæsar.
It is perhaps not to be wondered at that not a scrap of ancient Massilia should remain above ground, not a fragment of city wall, of temple, or of amphitheatre, for the valleys have been choked up to the depth of eighteen to twenty feet, and the summits of the rounded hills have been shorn off. But to obtain some idea of the past, the Archæological Museum at the extremity of the Prado should be visited. One room is devoted to the remains of pagan Massilia, another to the Christian sarcophagi discovered in the catacombs of S. Victor.
The siege of Marseilles by the army of Cæsar was by no means the only trial of that description the city had to undergo. The next most serious investment was that by the Constable de Bourbon, who had transferred his services to Charles V. and fought against his sovereign, Francis I. Pope Leo X. had stirred up the emperor and had effected a coalition of England, Austria, Milan, Venice, Florence, and Genoa, against France. Charles despatched the Constable de Bourbon against Marseilles, and he appeared before it on August 19th, 1524, but met with a stubborn resistance.
Furious at not being able to obtain a surrender, he ordered a general assault, and promised his soldiers to suffer them to pillage the town at their own sweet will. On September 25th the besiegers attacked the walls, managed to beat down a portion and form a breach, through which they poured exultant. But bitter was their disappointment when they discovered that the besieged had raised a second wall within, in crescent form, on the top of which was the garrison, armed with culverins, and that at the points of junction of the new wall with the old were planted cannon which, with their cross fire, could mow down all who rushed into the semilunar area. The Spanish battalions hesitated, but were urged forward by their captains, and a frightful carnage ensued. The space was heaped with dead, and the baffled Constable, with rage in his heart, running short of ammunition and provisions, was forced to raise the siege and retire, on the night of September 25th.
But that which has proved to Marseilles more fatal than sieges has been the plague, which has reappeared time after time, becoming almost endemic. The unsanitary condition of the town, the absence of wholesome water, invited its presence. The magnificent works of the canal of Marseilles now conduct to the town the waters of the Durance. This canal was constructed between 1837 and 1848, extends a length of ninety-five miles, and is carried through tunnels and over aqueducts. The body of water thus conducted to Marseilles not only supplies the precious liquid for drinking and bathing, but also sends rills to water the gardens which would otherwise be barren. How necessary this great work was may be judged from the number of deaths at Marseilles at the outbreak of the plague in 1720, when from 40,000 to 50,000 persons succumbed.
Amidst