Massalia in 218 B.C.

Massalia — Summer 218 BC · Rome’s Eyes on the West.

Massalia — the great Phocaean Greek city at the mouth of the Rhône, foremost of all the Hellenes of the western sea and the oldest, staunchest friend of Rome in these parts. A merchant republic governed by a sober aristocratic council — the Six Hundred, whose presidents are the Timouchoi — she is famed for good government, for seamanship above any other city, and for the olive and the vine she first taught to the Gauls. From her harbours runs a chain of daughter-colonies down the coast: Emporion and Rhode in Iberia, Agathe, Nikaia, Antipolis, Olbia and Tauroention along the shore of Gaul. Hemmed by Ligurians and Celts at her back and rivalled by Carthage at sea, she is Rome’s eyes in the west — and in this year of 218 it is Massaliot ships and Massaliot word that track Hannibal’s host to the crossing of the Rhône.

Where the Rhône pours into the Sardinian Sea, on a rocky headland with a deep, sheltered harbour at its foot, stands Massalia — planted by the seafarers of Phocaea six generations past and grown into the first city of the western Greeks. She lives by the sea and by trade: her ships range the whole western Mediterranean, her merchants carry wine, oil and the wares of Greece up the great river into the lands of the Gauls, and her own colonies stud the coast from Iberia to Liguria. Ringed about by Ligurian and Celtic peoples who covet her fields and harry her roads, and matched at sea by Carthage, she has made her surety the friendship of Rome, to whom she has been faithful longer and more truly than any other city of the west. Now, in this summer, Hannibal’s vast army comes up out of Iberia toward the Rhône; the Roman consul Publius Scipio puts in to her harbours; and it is Massaliot scouts who first bring word of where the Carthaginian means to cross.