City
Pella
Pella was the capital of the kingdom of Macedonia, made the royal seat by Archelaus I around the end of the fifth century BCE in place of the older capital at Aigai, which remained the dynastic burial-place. From Pella, Philip II built the army and the power that subdued Greece, and here Alexander the Great was born and raised; it was a planned city of broad streets and rich houses, famous for its pebble mosaics. After Rome ended the Macedonian kingdom in 168 BCE the city declined, and an earthquake and the silting of its harbor-lake finished it.
The name is simply Pélla in Greek and Pella in Latin, the Roman form taken unchanged from the Greek. Its origin is uncertain; it is sometimes connected with a word for stone or stony ground, but the etymology is not secure and is best left open. What gives the modest name its weight is what was decided under it: the capital of a half-Greek frontier kingdom on the northern edge of the Greek world became, in two reigns, the center from which a Macedonian house conquered from the Adriatic to the Indus. Pella should not be confused with the other ancient Pella, a city of the Decapolis in the Jordan valley to which Christian tradition says the church of Jerusalem fled; they share only a name.
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◆ Pella, the city
Name families
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The Pélla family
The name of Pella, the Macedonian royal capital and birthplace of Alexander, Greek Pélla and Latin Pella; the name is sometimes connected to a word for stony ground, but the etymology is uncertain.
Attestation timeline
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Names across languages
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Ancient Greek c. 400 BCE – 600 CE #
Πέλλα PéllaΠέλλα
- Transliteration
- Pélla
- IPA
- /ˈpel.la/
- Meaning
- “Pella”
- Confidence
- attested
The Greek name of the city, Pélla, the royal capital of Macedonia from the reign of Archelaus, the seat of Philip and Alexander. The etymology is uncertain; the name is sometimes linked to a word for stone or stony soil, but no derivation is secure, and Pélla is best taken as one more of the local place-names of the half-Hellenic Macedonian land.
Pélla is a small name attached to a large history. The city itself left little to the imagination of later ages beyond its mosaics, but as a name it stands for the Macedonian monarchy at its height, the planned capital from which a frontier kingdom that the southern Greeks had scorned as half-barbarian went out to conquer the Persian empire. The word that may once have meant no more than “the stony place” became the address of the court of Alexander.
Sources (2)
- Strabo, Geography 7, fr. 20, 23; Herodotus, Histories 7.123.
- Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ). 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940, s.v. Πέλλα.
Cite this entry
Rajagopal, Shriram. "Pélla (Ancient Greek name for Pella)." Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names. Last modified June 18, 2026. https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/pella#ancient-greek-pella.
@misc{onomastikon-pella-ancient-greek-pella, author = {Rajagopal, Shriram}, title = {Pélla (Ancient Greek name for Pella)}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/pella#ancient-greek-pella}}, note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names} }Latin c. 200 BCE – 500 CE #
Pella PellaPella
- Transliteration
- Pella
- IPA
- /ˈpel.la/
- Meaning
- “Pella”
- Derived from
- Ancient Greek Pélla
- Confidence
- attested
The Latin name of the city, Pella, taken unchanged from the Greek, the Macedonian capital Rome reached in the wars that ended the kingdom; Livy describes its fall to Aemilius Paullus after the battle of Pydna in 168 BCE. From the name Latin made the adjective Pellaeus, “of Pella,” which the poets used to mean simply “of Alexander,” the Pellaean youth who conquered the world.
Pella adds nothing to the Greek name but the Roman spelling, yet it carries the name’s association forward: in Latin poetry Pellaeus became a shorthand for Alexander and his boundless ambition, so that the small Macedonian capital lent its name as an epithet to the conqueror it had raised. The city faded, but through Latin the word stayed alive as a byword for the reach of Alexander, the man of Pella.
Sources (1)
- Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 44 (the Third Macedonian War); Lewis, Charlton T., and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. Pella, Pellaeus.
Cite this entry
Rajagopal, Shriram. "Pella (Latin name for Pella)." Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names. Last modified June 18, 2026. https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/pella#latin-pella.
@misc{onomastikon-pella-latin-pella, author = {Rajagopal, Shriram}, title = {Pella (Latin name for Pella)}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/pella#latin-pella}}, note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names} }Cite this page
Rajagopal, Shriram. "Pella." Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names. Last modified June 18, 2026. https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/pella.
@misc{onomastikon-pella,
author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
title = {Pella},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/civilizations/pella}},
note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}Spot an error on this page? Suggest a correction →