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Miniatures of French history
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About this book
Miniatures of French History is a compact collection of episodes drawn from the early chronicles of Gaul, assembled by Hilaire Belloc. The book opens with a mythic retelling of the Phoceans’ voyage to the western Mediterranean, describing how a priestess of Artemis guides them to the harbour that will become Marseilles. Belloc then shifts to a more concrete episode from 56 B.C., recounting Julius Caesar’s frustrated attempts to subdue the seafaring Veneti of Brittany. The narrative moves fluidly from legendary foundation myths to the gritty realities of Roman‑Gaulish conflict, offering a panoramic glimpse of France’s formative centuries without venturing into a full‑scale history.
Belloc’s voice is that of a learned Victorian essayist, rich in classical allusion and ornate prose. His style blends scholarly detail with a storyteller’s flair, making the work appealing to readers who enjoy concise, dramatized sketches of early French events, particularly those with an interest in classical mythology, Roman expansion, and the cultural roots of cities such as Marseilles.
Who appears in Miniatures of French history
- Julius CaesarMiddle-aged Roman general in 56 BC, short curly hair, laurel wreath, breastplate, crimson cloak
The opening · free to read
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.
Until at last, when they had passed and marked far inland to the north the high snows of the Alps, and when they had so divided the waters westward for many days more, they came to a shelter cunningly hidden by a god, but discoverable to sailors who had long known the sea. It was a place where many might pass and never guess an entry, but where one with keen eyes would discover, masked under a turn of rock, the gates of a harbour; and thither the helmsman steered them round with his broad oar astern, right round in a sweep (for the haven is cut backward, looking as it were not to the sea, but back again on to the land). And when they had passed the narrow gates they found themselves in a clear, deep pool with firm rock all about and riding for a hundred ships.
There did they let go the anchor, and came to rest after so long a wandering.
About the shores of this perfect harbour they saw no men, or houses of men, nor tillage of fields, nor temples of the gods, but very barren hills high inshore; and the place seemed theirs altogether.
When, therefore, they had landed, still under the guidance of the priestess Aristarché, and sent messengers up into the bare hill country and the low, spare brush of that land, those messengers came back to tell them that all this part was the country of a Ligurian king, and this king was friendly to strangers, and his name was Nam; nor had this people any knowledge of the sea, nor did they use boats and sails and oars, nor were they jealous of their port.
But first, before he would talk of anything with ambassadors, King Nam must give a feast; for he had a daughter to wed, and by the custom of her people she must choose her mate at this feast and declare him at the board. To this feast the Phoceans were bidden, and their embassy sat, with King Nam at his side, having for their chief men Simos the merchant, their captain, and the young man Protis his son; there also round the board sat the chiefs of the hill men, each from his tribe, for each was a suitor and hoped that King Nam’s daughter would choose him. The name of that princess was Gyptis, nor did she come to the feast where the men were, for she was a virgin.
But when the feast was done and the time for her entry had come, the king sent for the princess and ordered that all should be done according to custom. And she came into the room like one dreaming, and she held in her right hand a chalice full of pure water, which she was to give to whomever she would, or to whomever the gods directed her. And that man to whom she gave it should be her husband.
Gyptis then, going round the board while all watched her, put forward the chalice in her hand and held it out to the young man Protis, the stranger from overseas; and he took it and drank, and the king applauded, saying, “This thing was done by the gods.” For it was a god that had guided the virgin, and great Artemis presided here, though the Ligurians did not know her, for they were barbarians.
Once again, therefore, had the goddess worked by a woman, and the chieftains from the hills did not complain, for they knew her presence.
Protis, rising up and taking the cup, drank from it and confirmed the espousals, and the Ligurian men swore firm friendship with the newcomers, and granted them the shore; and, since a harbour was their desire, King Nam made over this empty harbour to them, where the Phoceans, with great rejoicings and thanks to the goddess, built all that a city should have--a council-house, and a market-place, and walls, and gates, and a place for games, and a stronghold also upon a height behind the harbour, and temples for the gods. But their chief temple they raised to Artemis, and put in it that statue of her which they had brought from very far away, from the Phocean land and from home.
When all this was done, and the city founded and the harbour ordered, and ships sailing out and in, Gyptis and Protis, man and wife, were saluted king and queen of the city; but she queen more than he king, because it was the women that had made Marseilles, and they owed themselves all to the goddess.
Now when Gyptis and Protis had thus taken their thrones to rule over Marseilles from youth to age, they took new names as befitted their new station and the new fortunes of the Phocean land, and in these names they bore record of the great good that had happened. For Protis, the lucky bridegroom, called himself Euxenos, which is in Greek the “well fortuned guest”; but Gyptis, who had brought him so great a dowry, putting off the Ligurian name that her mother had given, put on a Greek name also, and called herself “Aristoxena,” which is in Greek “the best of hostesses.” And she worshipped with him her husband, and with all the Phoceans, at the shrine of Artemis, which Aristarché served, the priestess of the city. And so they ruled until they died.
This is the way in which Marseilles was founded, and thus it was that the women founded Marseilles.
Julius Cæsar had thought to have subdued all the country of Gaul and all the tribes inhabiting it, and he had left in garrison, upon this point and that, certain of his lieutenants with their legionaries, while he himself went off to another and distant part of his command--the mountains of Illyria, which overlook the Adriatic Sea; and this was in the winter, fifty-six years before our Lord was born.
But during that winter time, when the gathering of food for the armies had made the Roman officers in Gaul send out messengers and embassies for the gathering of grain, the seafaring men of Brittany, always in a way apart from other men, and hard, and keeping their own counsel, and difficult to subdue, had secretly prepared revolt and had sent all up the Channel past by what is Normandy to-day, and by what is the Boulonnais to-day, and Ponthieu and the Artois, summoning to their aid any of the sailors that would dare to come, men knowing the rough seas, well provisioned with many ships. They sent also over the sea to Britain for aid, and from all these parts upon either side of the Narrow Seas they found alliances, for they were preparing a great thing. Cæsar, far off in the south, heard nothing of all this, and the great officers, his lieutenants in Gaul, were also ignorant of what was toward, so silently and rapidly did the Bretons work.
Until, as the year turned, young Crassus, who was in command over the Seventh Legion and had cantoned it for the winter in the country about the lower Loire, and who, like the others, had sent out his messengers to get wheat from the tribes around, heard that his embassy to the Veneti (by that name were these Bretons then called), Velanius and Silius, had been detained, and that the tribes farther on to the north in Normandy held also other deputies whom he had sent thither to levy food. Even as he heard this, young Crassus learnt from those whom the Veneti had sent to him with the news of their proud act, that if he would have his legates back he must himself give up the Breton hostages whom he had in his camp. Now these Bretons, the Veneti of Vannes, in thus detaining the Roman officers and in sending to their general such a message, knew that they had thrown down a challenge of life and death against all the power of Rome.
Out from that coast to the north and to the south of the Loire’s mouth stretches for ever all away to the west the great ocean, here stormy beyond most seas and filling and emptying the rocky bays with swift irregular tides, and beating upon islands and many heaped boulders of stone that are islands at high water, and at low water joined to the mainland by spits of sand.
This sea the Veneti held, and they were the masters of it altogether, for though their own land did not reach to the Loire itself, yet their great ships were dreaded and obeyed for many a day’s sail, and the rare shelters behind the juts of rock or within the islands they claimed to be theirs, even when the land about was tilled by another tribe. These great ships of theirs, which were their pride, stood up like castles out of the sea, very high at poop and prow, and of marvellous thick timber, with huge foot-square baulks and the nails clamping them thick as a man’s thumb, so stout was all their building and so great and heavy were their ships of war. Iron also--and this seemed strange to the Romans and a sort of terrifying thing--were their anchor cables, and the vast square sails, whereby such weights of wood and men and iron were moved, were not of canvas but of hide, another thing monstrous in Roman eyes.
Against this power of theirs by sea the Veneti were very sure that the little men from the south could do nothing, cunning though they were in arts, and always favoured by fortune in their wars, and full of wealth, and coming--the leaders of them--from palaces for homes. For the Veneti were sailors, and sailors ever believe that the sea is wholly theirs, and is a certain defence against all evil and a certain avenue to all good fortune. But the Romans were soldiers, ignorant of the sea and fearing it, nor had they any fleet on those shores, nor could they seemingly make one which could at all dispute the mastery of the Atlantic with the great leathern-sailed vessels and their high freeboards that could withstand all the anger of the sea. And more than this, the Veneti knew what a labyrinth was all that coast under the water of it, and how many shoals and rocks there lay hidden by the tide, and where these lurked; and they knew what fate would befall vessels that struck, and they knew the shoals whereon their own great boats, flat in the bilge, could lie unharmed when the tide left them, but which would wreck hulls too deep and narrow, and ignorant of the peculiar custom of those waters.
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