Read "The Mediterranean" by Grant Allen online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Its Greek founders and early history -- Superb view from the sea -- The Cannebiere -- The Parado and Chemin de la Corniche -- Chateau d'If and Monte-Cristo -- Influence of the Greeks in Marseilles -- Ravages by plague and pestilence -- Treasures of the Palais des Arts -- The chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde -- The new Marseilles and its future.
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 Phocaea 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.