How Greek are modern south Frenchmen?>Marseille is often considered the oldest city in France. Continuously inhabited since 600 BC, it was founded by Anatolian Greeks as Massilia. (pictured artist's depiction of ancient Massilia). >Pytheas of Massalia was a Greek geographer, explorer and astronomer from the Greek colony of Massalia. He made a voyage of exploration to Northern Europe in about 325 BC. On this voyage, he circumnavigated and visited a considerable part of the British Isles. He was the first known Greek scientific visitor to see and describe the Arctic, polar ice, and the Celtic and Germanic tribes. He is also the first person on record to describe the midnight sun. The theoretical existence of some Northern phenomena that he described, such as a frigid zone, and temperate zones where the nights are very short in summer and the sun does not set at the summer solstice, was already known. Similarly, reports of a country of perpetual snow and darkness (the country of the Hyperboreans) had reached the Mediterranean some centuries before. Pytheas introduced the idea of distant Thule to the geographic imagination, and his account of the tides is the earliest one known that suggests the moon as their cause.
