Tarentum

The Greek name of the city, Táras, the name of its hero-founder, a son of Poseidon whom the god saved from shipwreck by sending a dolphin to carry him to shore; the dolphin-rider became the badge of the city’s celebrated coinage. Táras was also the name of the small river by the harbor. The city was the only foundation of Sparta, planted by the Partheniai, and its Doric speech and Spartan descent marked it among the Greek cities of Italy.

Táras is the head of the family and the source, by an interesting route, of the Latin and modern names. The Greek noun declines with an oblique stem in -nt-: nominative Táras, but genitive Tárantos, and it is on that stem, not the bare nominative, that the Latin Tarentum is built. So the modern Taranto preserves a consonant cluster the Greek showed only in its oblique cases, the -nt- of Tárantos surfacing in the Roman form and lasting into Italian; the hero’s name reaches the present through the grammar of its own declension.

The Latin name of the city, Tarentum, built not on the Greek nominative Táras but on its oblique stem Tarant-, with the Latin place-ending added; the city Rome fought for in the war with Pyrrhus and took for good in the Second Punic War. To the Romans Tarentum was a soft and pleasant place, Horace’s mild-wintered town where he hoped to end his days, its Greek luxury proverbial.

Tarentum is the form that carried the hero’s name into the West, and it preserves a grammatical fossil. The -nt- in the Latin name is not an addition but an inheritance, the consonant of the Greek genitive Tárantos frozen into the Roman form; from Tarentum came the medieval and modern Taranto. The Latin thus chose the declined stem over the plain name, and so handed down to Italian a shape of the word the Greeks themselves used only when the name was in the genitive, the dolphin-hero Taras surviving in his own oblique case.