About six hundred years before the birth of Christ, when the Mediterranean, ringed round with a long series of commercial colonies, was first beginning to transform itself with marvelous rapidity into "a Greek lake," a body of adventurous Hellenic mariners--young Columbuses of their day--full of life and vigor, sailed forth from Phocæa in Asia Minor, and steered their course, by devious routes, to what was then the Far West, in search of a fitting and unoccupied place in which to found a new trading city. Hard pressed by the Persians on their native shore, these free young Greeks--the Pilgrim Fathers of modern Marseilles--left behind for ever the city of their birth, and struck for liberty in some distant land, where no Cyrus or Xerxes could ever molest them. Sailing away past Greece and Sicily, and round Messina into the almost unknown Tyrrhenian Sea, the adventurous voyagers arrived at last, after various false starts in Corsica and elsewhere, at some gaunt white hills of the Gaulish coast, and cast anchor finally in a small but almost land-locked harbor, under the shelter of some barren limestone mountains. Whether they found a Phoenician colony already established on the spot or not, matters as little to history nowadays as whether their leaders' names were really Simos and Protis or quite otherwise. What does matter is the indubitable fact that Massalia, as its Greek founders called it, preserved through all its early history the impress of a truly Hellenic city; and that even to this moment much good Greek blood flows, without question, in the hot veins of all its genuine native-born citizens.