The Po River

Ēridanós is the name of a mythical river of the far west, the stream into which Phaethon plunged when the sun-chariot threw him, and on whose banks his sisters, the Heliades, were changed into poplars that wept tears of amber. The name is securely attested in Greek poetry from early times, but its application to the real Po is a later and disputed identification, marked so here. Herodotus would have none of it: he doubts, in his account of the sources of amber and tin, that any river called Eridanos exists at all, observing that the name “sounds Greek” and smells of a poet’s invention rather than a real foreign river.

Yet the identification stuck, for a concrete reason. The Po delta lay at the Mediterranean end of the long amber road down from the Baltic, and amber was exactly the marvel the Eridanos myth explained; so geographers from Polybius on equated the legendary amber-river with the actual Po, the place where amber really did arrive. Ēridanós is therefore on this page as the Po’s mythical double, a name that may never have been meant for it but was fastened to it because the myth and the trade pointed to the same shore. The Greeks even set the river in the sky, where the long faint constellation Eridanus still winds south from Orion’s foot.

The Latin name of the river, Padus, the name Rome gave the great stream of the north, the boundary and lifeline of Cisalpine Gaul. The word is probably not Latin in origin but Ligurian or pre-Roman, taken over with the land; Pliny, describing the river, carefully records that it had three names at once, Padus to the Romans, Bodincus to the Ligurians, and Eridanus to the poets.

Padus is the name that lasted. Through it the river is the Greek Pádos, and from a syncopated late form of Padus comes the modern Italian Po. It is the plain, administrative name, the river of the maps and the legions, against which the Greek Ēridanós stands as the river of myth; the same water is Padus to the surveyor and Eridanos to the poet, and it is the surveyor’s word, worn down to a single syllable, that the river answers to today.

The Greek name of the river, Pádos, a straightforward transcription of the Latin Padus, the form the Greek geographers and historians used for the real river of northern Italy. It is the prosaic counterpart to the poetic Ēridanós, and Polybius marks the relation exactly, describing the river the Romans call the Padus as the one “the poets celebrate as the Eridanos.”

Pádos is the workaday Greek name, the river as the geographers found it rather than as the myth imagined it. Its interest on this page is precisely that it is the un-mythical Greek form: where Ēridanós belongs to legend and was doubted by Herodotus, Pádos is simply the Latin Padus in Greek letters, the name a Polybius or a Strabo used when describing the actual Po to a Greek-reading public. The two Greek names for one river measure the distance between the poets’ Italy and the geographers’.