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.” The long Phocean ship, narrow and lithe in line like a greyhound, low in wall, shot forward under fifty rowers. She so roamed from headland to headland westward all the summer through, and her lookout peered for harbours that no man had yet taken, and for an open emplacement where the new city might stand. All the while the figure of great Artemis, the sister of the Sun, whom Aristarché served with sacrifice, stood upon their prow, and all their good fortune in the beginning of this thing was from women altogether. So they went on from headland to headland, still finding every place of vantage taken; and still shooting westward by day, anchored through the summer nights under the shelter of some jutting land. Though they had so sailed for many days through the Mediterranean weather, they had not yet found a place for a city. Round the long bay which the Ligurians see from their high hills above the shore, round the bended knee of the north Italian waters, they found cities and islands and promontories encircling little gulfs, but none that would welcome them, and none standing empty for those who would seek new land.