Agde is a commune in the Héraultdepartment in Southern France. It is the Mediterranean port of the Canal du Midi. Agde is known for the distinctive black basalt used in local buildings such as the cathedral of Saint Stephen, built in the 12th century to replace a 9th-century Carolingian edifice built on the foundations of a fifth-century Romanchurch. Bishop Guillaume fortified the cathedral’s precincts and provided it with a 35-metre donjon (keep). The Romanesque cloister of the cathedral was demolished in 1857.
Agde is located on the Hérault river, 4 kilometres (2 miles) from the Mediterranean Sea, and 750 kilometres (466 miles) from Paris. The Canal du Midi connects to the Hérault river at the Agde Round Lock (“L’Écluse Ronde d’Agde”) just north of Agde, and the Hérault flows into the Mediterranean at Le Grau d’Agde. Agde station has high speed rail connections to Paris and Perpignan, and regional services to Narbonne, Montpellier and Avignon.
Agde (525 BCE) is one of the oldest towns in France, after Béziers (575 BCE) and Marseille (600 BCE). Agde (Agathe Tyche, “good fortune”) was a 5th-century BCE Greek colony settled by Phocaeans from Massilia. The Greek name was Agathe. 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.
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.
