Massalia: how Greeks founded Marseille

About 2,600 years ago, Greeks did not live only in Greece. Many lived on the coast of Asia Minor, in today's Turkey. One of their cities was Φώκαια (Phocaea). Today it is the small town of Foça.

The people of Phocaea were great sailors. The historian Herodotus says they were the first Greeks to make long voyages by sea. They did not use slow, round cargo ships. They used fast ships with fifty oars. They sailed far to the west, to Italy and Spain.

Around 600 BC, a group of Phocaeans arrived on the south coast of today's France, east of the river Rhône. They found a safe bay, which the Greeks called the Lacydon. Next to it they built a new Greek city and named it Μασσαλία (Massalia). A city like this, founded by Greeks far from home, was an ἀποικία (apoikia), a colony. It was a new polis, with its own laws and its own gods. Massalia is today's Marseille, often called the oldest city in France.

Ancient writers told a love story about the founding of Massalia. There are two versions, and the names in them are different.

In the version of Justin, a writer of Roman times, two Greek captains, Simos and Protis, came to the land of a local people, the Segobrigii. Their king, Nannus, was holding a feast. His daughter Gyptis had to choose a husband. She would give water to the man she wanted. She walked past all the local men and held out the water to the Greek, Protis. So Protis married Gyptis, and the king gave the Greeks land to build their city.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle told the story a little differently. In his version, the Greek was called Euxenus and the girl was called Petta. She gave him a cup of wine mixed with water. Their son was called Protis.

Is the story true? We cannot be sure. But it tells us something important: the Greeks needed the friendship of the people who already lived there.

Massalia grew around its λιμήν (limen), its harbour. The Greek geographer Strabo wrote that the harbour lay at the foot of a rock shaped like a theatre. On the hill above, the people of Massalia built temples to Artemis of Ephesus and to Apollo.

Massalia became a rich city of trade. Its ἔμποροι (emporoi), the merchants, loaded their πλοῖα (ploia), their ships, and sailed along the coasts. Wine, οἶνος (oinos), was one of their important goods. The city made its own silver coins with the faces of Artemis and Apollo. It also set up new trading towns in Spain, in Corsica and on the coast of France, for example at Antibes and Agde. Near the end of the 4th century BC, an explorer from Massalia, Pytheas, sailed all the way to Britain.

Justin also writes that the people around Massalia learned many things from the Greeks: to farm their fields, to build walls around their towns, to prune the ἄμπελος (ampelos), the vine, and to plant the ἐλαία (elaia), the olive tree. This is how one ancient writer saw it, so historians read it with care.

Massalia stayed a free Greek city for a long time, and it was a friend of Rome. But in 49 BC it took the side of Pompey in a Roman civil war. Julius Caesar besieged the city, and it had to open its gates. Even under Roman rule, the city kept the Greek language until about the 5th century AD.

You can still find the Greek past in Marseille today. The Old Port, the Vieux-Port, is the Lacydon of the first Greek sailors. Near it, in the Jardin des Vestiges, visitors walk among the stones of the ancient port, found by archaeologists. And the city has kept its old name in Greek: Greeks still call Marseille Μασσαλία.

In 2024, Marseille welcomed a special visitor from Greece: the Olympic flame. It did not come by plane. Like the first Greeks, it came by sea.