Italia

The Greek name Hespería, “the western land,” from hésperos, the evening and the west; the Greeks used it for the lands toward the sunset, and most often for Italy, which lay west across the Ionian Sea. Because it is a relative term, it could also reach further west to Spain, distinguished when needed as Hespería Eschátē, “furthest Hesperia”; but in the poets it is Italy, the near western land, that Hespería usually means.

Hespería is the directional name of Italy, and the mirror image of its neighbor’s Anatolḗ. Anatolia is “the east” from Constantinople; Hesperia is “the west” from Greece; both are names that exist only relative to the speaker, fixing a whole country by the quarter of the sky it lies toward. It is the most purely poetic of Italy’s names, a country called simply “the sunset land” by the Greeks who looked toward it across the water in the evening.

The Greek name Italía, which the Greeks of the southern colonies first applied to the toe of the peninsula, the country of the Italói, a people of the far south near modern Catanzaro. The ancients connected the name to a word for a young bull or calf, the Oscan vítelú, Latin vitulus, and a tradition recorded by Varro and others held that the land was named “the land of calves” for its cattle, or for a people who bore the calf as their token. From this southern beginning the name slowly widened northward.

Italía is the source from which the whole later history of the name flows, and the record of its first, smaller meaning. To the early Greek geographers Italía was only the southern tip, and Sicily, Campania, and the north lay outside it; the name’s expansion to cover the entire peninsula was a Roman achievement, following Rome’s unification of the land. On a page whose neighbor, Anatolia, shows a name shrinking from a continent to a peninsula, Italía shows the opposite motion, a name climbing from a single cape to a whole country.

The Greek name Oinōtría, “the land of vines,” after the Oinōtroi, the Oenotrians, a people the Greeks placed in the far south of Italy. The name was understood to come from oînos, “wine,” for the vine-rich country they inhabited, and like Italía itself it began as a name for the southern tip of the peninsula before the poets extended it. It is among the oldest Greek names for the region, used by Herodotus of the south Italian coast.

Oinōtría belongs, with Italía, to the earliest layer of Greek naming for the peninsula, when the Greek colonists of the south knew only the southern lands and called them by their peoples and their produce, the Italoi’s country and the wine-land of the Oenotrians. That two of Italy’s names, the conquering Italía and the poetic Oinōtría, both began as names for the same southern toe is a fitting emblem of the page: the country that would bear a single name to the world started, in Greek mouths, as a cluster of small names for its nearest cape.

The Latin name Italia, the form under which the peninsula became, for the first time, a single named country. As Rome extended citizenship and the name together, Italia came to mean the whole land from the Strait of Messina to the Alps, an administrative and sentimental unity that Augustus organized into eleven regions. Varro reports the old derivation from vitulus, “calf,” and the rebels of the Social War had already made the native form Víteliú the emblem of an Italian cause against Rome itself, so that the calf-name carried, for a moment, the meaning of Italian independence.

Italia is the endonym that the modern country still bears, essentially unchanged in two thousand years. It is also the form that carried the name abroad: through the Latin Bible’s account of Paul’s voyage to Rome it passed into the Syriac, Geʿez, and Arabic scriptures, and through Latin literacy into every European language. Of the many names the poets gave Italy, this plain one, the land of calves, is the only one that conquered, outliving Hespería, Ausonía, and the rest to become the country’s name in every tongue.

The poetic name Ausonia, after the Ausones, one of the oldest peoples of southern Italy whose name the Greeks and Romans extended to the whole land. Originally it denoted a particular tribe of central and southern Italy; in the hands of the poets, Greek and Latin alike, it widened into a grand and antique name for all of Italy, and the Ausonii became, in epic, the Italians as a whole. Virgil uses it throughout the Aeneid for the land Aeneas is fated to win.

Ausonia is the antiquarian among Italy’s names, the one that reaches back to a vanished people to lend the country an air of deep age. Where Italia names the land for its cattle and Hesperia for its direction, Ausonia names it for an aboriginal tribe long absorbed into Rome, a name out of the legendary past. It belongs to the same impulse as the other poetic names on this page, the wish to call so storied a land by something grander than its plain and conquering name.

The Latin name Hesperia, taken from the Greek and made a staple of Roman epic. Virgil uses it for Italy as the promised land of Aeneas: “there is a place, the Greeks call it Hesperia by name,” the oracle tells the Trojans, sending them west to the country they do not yet know is Italy. The borrowed Greek word let Latin poets name their own land by its Greek, sunset-ward epithet, lending it an air of distance and destiny.

Hesperia in Latin is a Greek name for Italy used by Italians, and that is its peculiar charm. A Roman poet calling Italy Hesperia names his homeland as the Greeks did, from the outside and from the east, as the land of the evening; the word carries into Latin the viewpoint of the Greek mariner looking west. Of Italy’s chorus of names, this is the one that lets the country see itself, for a line of verse, through its neighbors’ eyes.

The Syriac name Iṭalya, taken from the Greek of the New Testament. The Peshitta carries it through the narrative of Paul: Aquila has lately come “from Italya,” the centurion is ordered to sail with his prisoner “to Italya,” and the letter to the Hebrews sends greetings from “those of Italya.” The form is the Greek Italía in Syriac dress, with the emphatic ṭ that Syriac uses for the Greek tau in such names.

Iṭalya shows the western country reaching the Aramaic East solely through scripture. Italy lay far outside the Syriac world, and the only reason its name appears in Syriac at all is the apostle’s journey to Rome, which the Acts of the Apostles narrate as a sea-voyage toward Italya. The name of the land that ruled the Mediterranean entered the language of the Mesopotamian churches not as a political fact but as the destination of a prisoner’s ship.

The Geʿez name Iṭalya, carried into Ethiopic from the Greek of the New Testament, where Italy is the destination of Paul’s voyage and the home of the senders of the letter to the Hebrews. Like its Syriac counterpart it renders the Greek Italía with an emphatic ṭ, and it appears in the Ethiopic Acts and Epistles as a distant western land known only from the apostolic story.

Iṭalya is the farthest reach of Italy’s name in this atlas, the country of Rome named in the liturgical language of the Ethiopian highlands. It is a measure of how scripture redrew the map of names: a Geʿez-speaking Christian, who would never see the Mediterranean, knew the name of Italy because the Bible’s account of the early church ran, at its climax, toward Rome, and so the land of the caesars entered Ethiopic as a waypoint on the road of the gospel.

The Arabic name Īṭāliyā, for the Italian peninsula, taken ultimately from the Latin. Arab geographers knew Italy well across the central Mediterranean, with Sicily under Muslim rule for two centuries and Arab traders and raiders active along the Italian coasts; al-Idrīsī, working at the Norman court of Sicily, described the peninsula and its cities in detail. Beside Īṭāliyā the Arabic sources also use names for its parts and peoples, the Lombards and the Franks, but the old name of the whole was understood.

Īṭāliyā is the southern and eastern continuation of the Latin name, the form by which the Arabic world knew the land across the sea. Where the Syriac and Geʿez forms came to Italy through the Bible, the Arabic came largely through geography and trade, the practical knowledge of a Mediterranean power that had ruled Sicily and contended with Italy’s coasts. The calf-land of the old etymology was, to the Arab geographers, simply Īṭāliyā, a real country on the far northern shore of their sea.