v08_0831 - MASSALIA - MARSEILLES Litra à la tête casquée

MASSALIA - MARSEILLE

(474-410 BC)

Marseille experienced great prosperity in the 5th century BC, thanks to the period of tranquility in the western Mediterranean after the Carthaginian defeat at Himera in 480 BC. The Etruscans were in turn defeated by the Syracusans at Cumae . For nearly seventy years the ships of Massali could quietly sail the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The Sicilian affair in 413 BC and the Athenian and then Carthaginian intervention, accompanied by the destruction of Agrigento, led to a serious conflict which was to last half a century and extended to Magna Graecia. (Southern Italy).