Syracuse

The Greek name of the city, Syrákousai, a plural, the name the Corinthian colonists gave their foundation of 733 BCE. It is not a Greek word: it comes from the Sicels, the people of Sicily before the Greeks, and names Syrakō, the lagoon beside the great harbour, so that the settlers called the city after the marsh it stood by. The original nucleus, the islet in the harbour, kept its own pre-Greek name Ortygia. Doric Syracuse said Syrákosai.

Syrákousai is the headwater of every later form, and it carries a small lesson about colonial naming. The Greeks who founded the most Greek of Sicilian cities, the city of Archimedes and of the defeat of Athens, took its name ready-made from the island’s older inhabitants, naming their new home for a local feature in a language not their own. From this Sicel-Greek name descend the Latin Syrācūsae, the Arabic Saraqūsa, and the modern Siracusa; the city that became a byword for Greek Sicily bears, at its root, a Sicilian word the Greeks found already there.

The Latin name of the city, Syrācūsae, taken from the Greek, the form under which Rome knew the great Sicilian city it besieged and stormed in 211 BCE, when Archimedes was killed and the plunder of Syracuse first flooded Rome with Greek art. Cicero, prosecuting the governor Verres for looting the province, gives a famous tour of the city’s four quarters, naming Syracuse the greatest and most beautiful of Greek cities.

Syrācūsae is the link between the Greek name and the modern one: through Latin the Sicel-Greek Syrákousai reached the Romance speech of medieval Sicily and so the Italian Siracusa the city bears today. It is the ordinary western channel of this atlas, the Greek name frozen in Latin and handed on to Europe, but with a Sicilian twist, for it was in Latin-speaking, then Greek- and Arabic-ruled Sicily that the name kept changing hands, each conqueror taking it from the last.

The Arabic name of the city, Saraqūsa, the form under which Syracuse entered the Islamic world after the Aghlabid conquest of Sicily, when the city fell in 878 CE after a long siege and became, for a time, a town of the Emirate of Sicily. The Arabs took the name not from the Greek directly but from the Romance speech current in Byzantine and early Islamic Sicily, rendering the Latin Syrācūsae with the qāf that stands for the foreign hard c.

Saraqūsa is the southern, Islamic chapter of the name, the same word worn through yet another language. Syracuse is unusual in this atlas for the sheer number of powers that ruled and renamed it in turn, Corinthian Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Norman, each receiving the name from its predecessor; Saraqūsa is the Arabic stage in that relay, the city of Archimedes and of the great harbour passing, like Sicily itself, from the Greek to the Latin to the Arabic tongue without ever quite losing the Sicel marsh-name at its root.