Description : Agde (French pronunciation: ; Occitan: Agde ) is a commune in the Hérault department in southern France. It is the Mediterranean port of the Canal du Midi. Agde (525 BCE) is one of the oldest towns in France, after Béziers (575 BCE) and Marseilles (600 BCE). Agde (Agathe Tyche, "good fortune") was a 5th-century BCE Greek colony settled by Phocaeans from Massilia. The Greek name was Agathe (Ancient Greek: Ἀγάθη). The symbol of the city, the bronze Ephebe of Agde, of the 4th century BCE, recovered from the fluvial sands of the Hérault, was joined in December 2001 by two Early Imperial Roman bronzes, of a child and of Eros, which had possibly been on their way to a villa in Gallia Narbonensis when they were lost in a shipwreck. Development Maréchaux Bridge and the Hérault River In the history of Roman Catholicism in France, the Council of Agde was held 10 September 506 at Agde, under the presidency of Caesarius of Arles. It was attended by thirty-five bishops, and its forty-seven genuine canons dealt "with ecclesiastical discipline". One of its canons (the seventh), forbidding ecclesiastics to sell or alienate the property of the church from which they derived their living, seems to be the earliest mention of the later system of benefices.
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