Neapolis

Parthenópē is the older name of the settlement that became Naples, the name borne by the first Greek town on the site before the “new city” was founded beside it. It is the name of a Siren: in the legend, when Odysseus sailed past the Sirens bound to his mast and deaf to their song, the creatures, defeated, threw themselves into the sea, and the body of Parthenope was carried to this shore and buried, so that the place took her name. The town kept it until the founding of Neápolis, when, as the new city rose, the old one came to be called Palaepolis, “old city.”

Parthenópē is the discarded first name beneath the living one, the older layer this page keeps beside the surviving Neápolis, much as Sparta keeps Lakedaímōn or the Tiber its archaic Albula. It did not vanish entirely: Naples has cherished Parthenope as a poetic and sentimental name for itself ever since, the “Parthenopean” city, so that the buried Siren still names, in a softer key, the town that grew up over her grave. The new city won the everyday name; the old one kept the legend.

The Greek name of the city, Neápolis, “new city,” from néos, “new,” and pólis, “city,” the name the Greek colonists gave their foundation on the bay of Campania to mark it off from the older settlement beside it. It is a transparent, ordinary Greek compound, the kind of name Greeks gave new colonies all over the Mediterranean; there were Neapoleis in Africa, in Thrace, in Anatolia.

Neápolis is the rare colonial name that not only survived but kept its plain meaning visible all the way down. Through the Latin Neapolis it became the Italian Napoli and the English Naples, so that the city, by any measure one of the oldest in Italy, is permanently named “the new town.” The word froze at the moment of foundation and carried that moment forward for two and a half thousand years; Naples is new only in its name, and only because the Greeks who built it had an even older town next door.

The Latin name of the city, Neapolis, taken from the Greek with no change but the inflection, the name of the resolutely Greek city that Rome absorbed yet allowed to keep its language and customs. Roman Neapolis was a place of leisure and learning, the bay where Virgil chose to live and was buried, a corner of Greece on the Italian coast.

Neapolis is the bridge between the Greek name and the modern one. From the Latin, by the ordinary erosion of Latin into Italian, came Napoli, the syllables of “new city” worn smooth past recognition; English “Naples” follows the same line. The Latin preserved the Greek compound intact long enough to hand it to the Romance languages, which then ground it down into a name no Italian hears as “new” any longer, the meaning lost in the very form that carried it.

The Arabic name for Naples in al-Idrīsī’s Nuzhat al-mushtāq, which calls it madīnat Nābul al-sāḥiliyya, “the coastal city of Nābul,” and measures the sailing distances from its harbor to the islands of the bay. The shape records the Latin name in its Italian vernacular development rather than the classical form: by the twelfth century Neāpolis had contracted on local tongues toward Napoli, and Arabic, which lacks the sound p, rendered the result with b, exactly as it does elsewhere on the Italian coast.

The entry’s interest is where it was written. Al-Idrīsī described Naples from Palermo, ninety leagues down the same coast, working in Arabic at the court of a Norman king; this is not a distant report from Baghdad but Mediterranean geography written in Arabic from inside Italy. The city the Greeks had founded as the “new city” was, by the time this name was recorded, more than sixteen centuries old, among the oldest continuously inhabited names in al-Idrīsī’s whole book, and still called new in every language that spoke of it.