The Ionian Sea

The Greek name of the sea, Iónios, used as ho Iónios póntos, “the Ionian deep,” or Iónion pélagos, the western water between Greece and Italy. The Greeks explained the name by Io, the priestess of Hera whom Zeus loved: turned into a white heifer and hounded across the earth by Hera’s gadfly, she swam this gulf in her wandering, and Aeschylus has Prometheus prophesy that it would carry her name for all time. A rival tradition gave the sea an eponymous hero, an Illyrian Ionios drowned in it.

Iónios is the head of the family and the occasion for the page’s central correction. Whatever its true origin, the name is almost certainly not connected with the Ionians, the Iōnes of the Aegean and the Anatolian coast whose name gives Ionia and, through Persian and Semitic mediation, the whole Yawan family of names for the Greeks. Those Ionians lived far to the east of this western sea, and the resemblance of Iónios the sea to Iōnes the people is a coincidence of sound that has confused readers since antiquity. The Greeks preferred the heifer to the homonym, and the philologists agree: the Ionian Sea is not the sea of the Ionians.

The Latin name of the sea, mare Ionium, taken from the Greek, the water Roman ships crossed between Brundisium and Greece and the deep that Virgil’s storm-tossed Trojans labor through “in the great Ionian.” Pliny sets it between Italy and Greece in his survey of the Mediterranean’s parts.

Mare Ionium is the Greek name in Latin, carrying its disputed origin and its persistent confusion forward into the languages of the West, where the sea is “Ionian” still. It preserves, without comment, the same trap as the Greek: the Latin Ionium sits one letter from Iōnes, the Ionians, and from the Ionia of Asia Minor, though it has nothing to do with them. The Romans, like the Greeks before them and the moderns after, named the western sea with a word that only seems to belong to the eastern Greeks.