resolved to destroy the new city.  It was the time of the flowering of the vine, a season of great festivity amongst the Ionian Greeks, and Marseilles thought solely of the preparations for the feast.  The houses and public places were being decorated with branches and flowers.  No guard was set; no work was done.  Conran sent into the town a number of his men, some openly, as if to take part in the festivities, others hidden at the bottom of the cars which conveyed into Marseilles the branches and foliage from the outskirts.  He himself went and lay in ambush in a neighboring glen, with seven thousand men, they say, but the number is probably exaggerated, and waited for his emissaries to open the gates to him during the night.  But once more a woman, a near relation of the Gallic chieftain, was the guardian angel of the Greeks, and revealed the plot to a young man of Marseilles, with whom she was in love.  The gates were immediately shut, and so many Segobrigians as happened to be in the town were massacred.  Then, when night came on, the inhabitants, armed, went forth to surprise Conran in the ambush where he was awaiting the moment to surprise them.  And there he fell with all his men.

Delivered as they were from this danger, the Massilians nevertheless remained in a difficult and disquieting situation.  The peoplets around, in coalition against them, attacked them often, and threatened them incessantly.  But whilst they were struggling against these embarrassments, a grand disaster, happening in the very same spot whence they had emigrated half a century before, was procuring them a great accession of strength and the surest means of defence.  In the year 542 B.C., Phocea succumbed beneath the efforts of Cyrus, King of Persia, and her inhabitants, leaving to the conqueror empty streets and deserted houses, took to their ships in a body, to transfer their homes elsewhere.  A portion of this floating population made straight for Marseilles; others stopped at Corsica, in the harbor of Alalia, another Phocean colony.  But at the end of five years they too, tired of piratical life and of the incessant wars they had to sustain against the Carthaginians, quitted Corsica, and went to rejoin their compatriots in Gaul.

Thenceforward Marseilles found herself in a position to face her enemies.  She extended her walls all round the bay, and her enterprises far away.  She founded on the southern coast of Gaul and on the eastern coast of Spain, permanent settlements, which are to this day towns:  eastward of the Rhone, Hercules’ harbor, Moncecus (Monaco), Niccea (Nice), Antipolis (Antibes); westward, Heraclea Cacabaria (Saint-Gilles), Agaththae (Agdevall), Emporia; (Ampurias in Catalonia), &c., &c.  In valley of the Rhone, several towns of the Gauls, Cabellio were (Cavaili like on), Greek Avenio (Avignon), Arelate (Arles), for instance, colonies, so great there was the number of travellers or established merchants who spoke Greek.