Last Seen in Massilia (27 page)

Massilia is the Latin name for the city the founding Greeks called Massalia and which the modern French call Marseille. Our knowledge of the ancient city comes from an array of scattered, tantalizing references. From Aristotle and Cicero we learn something of the city’s government; Strabo explains the hierarchy of the Timouchoi. Servius’s commentary on
The Aeneid
cites a lost fragment of
The Satyricon,
which refers to the tradition of the scapegoat. Valerius Maximus relates some curious customs, such as the fact that the Massilians facilitated suicide as long as it was officially approved. From Plutarch’s
Life of Marius
comes the tale of the vineyard fenced with the bones of slain Gauls. Lucian’s
Toxaris, or Friendship
recites the strange tale of Cydimache, which I have freely adapted. My method has been to gather these intriguing tidbits and to assemble them around the crucial moment of Massilian history, the siege of the city by Julius Caesar in 49
B.C.

About the siege itself, our information is less scattered and more concrete, but naggingly inexact. Caesar’s self-serving (and therefore not entirely reliable)
The Civil War
is our prime source. Lucan’s epic
Pharsalia
vividly describes the razing of the ancient forest and the bloody sea battles, but Lucan is a poet, not a historian. Cassius Dio gives the background of the siege, and Vitruvius sketches a few details. The British historian T. Rice Holmes, in a feat of ratiocination worthy of his kinsman Sherlock, assembled all the data and put forward a credible reconstruction of events in
The Roman Republic and the Founder of the Empire
(1923). But as Holmes himself ruefully acknowledges,
“The history of the siege presents many difficulties and its chronology is obscure.”

Until very recently, comprehensive studies of ancient Massilia were to be found only in French, in Michel Clerc’s two-volume
Massalia
(1927, 1929) and J.-P. Clébert’s two-volume
Provence Antique
(1966, 1970). This changed in 1998 with the publication of A. Trevor Hodge’s witty and astute
Ancient Greek France.
(Noting the city’s position, before the siege, as Rome’s window onto Gaul, Hodge points out that “Massilia was an ideal centre for gathering intelligence, more or less in the way Berlin was in the old days of the Cold War.”) An older but still useful volume is
The Romans on the Riviera and the Rhone
by W. H. Hall (1898).

Nan Robkin pointed me to the research of A. Trevor Hodge long before his book was published. Claudine Chalmers supplied me with relevant pages from the
Guide de la Provence Mystérieuse.
Claude Cueni linked me to images of ancient Massilia from the Musée des Docks Romains and the Musée d’Histoire in Marseille. Penni Kimmel read the first draft. Thanks, as always, to Rick Solomon; to my editor, Keith Kahla; and to my agent, Alan Nevins.

The fates of various historical figures in
Last Seen in Massilia
—including Milo, Domitius, and Trebonius (not to mention Caesar)—may yet be dealt with in future volumes of the Roma Sub Rosa series. But as it seems unlikely that Gordianus will cross paths again with Gaius Verres, I will note that the notorious art connoisseur came to a bad end. Six years after the siege, still an exile in Massilia, Verres was put to death in the same round of proscriptions, ordered by Marc Antony, that proved fatal to Verres’s old nemesis, Cicero. Verres’s crime? Antony coveted one of his ill-gotten works of art.