Miniatures of French History

(599 B.C.)

It was the women who made Marseilles, and through women did there first come to this land writing and the living record of heroes, and wine, and building with stone, and a knowledge of the gods.

For the Phoceans, a Greek people from under the sunrise, had sent forth (many hundred years—more than five hundred years before the Romans came to make Gaul) a shipload to wander and to find new land. But that ship’s company a matron of Ephesus had gathered together. She was their priestess, and her goddess was at the prow. And that women thus led had come about in this fashion:⁠—

The Phocean men having consulted an oracle, the oracle had told them that they should send to Ephesus, where great Artemis, the sister of the Sun, had her temple and her shrine. So the Phoceans sent an embassy to the shrine of the goddess, and while they were there great Artemis appeared in a dream to Aristarché, a matron of that city, and said to her (standing by the bed with her hands uplifted), “Take one of those statues which are sacred to me, and join you these Phocean men under their captain, Simos, and his son Protis, merchants, and sail with them to the new land.”