The Tiber River

Albula is the archaic name of the Tiber, the name the river is said to have borne before it was called Tiberis. Livy reports it directly, that the Alban king Tiberinus Silvius drowned crossing “the Albula, which they now call the Tiber,” and that the river took the king’s name from his death; Varro, Vergil, and Ovid all preserve the same tradition. The name is a diminutive of albus, “white,” and means something like “the whitish one,” from the pale, sediment-laden color of the water.

Albula is the rare case in this atlas of a name a place is remembered as having shed, attested only in the act of being superseded: every source that gives it does so to explain that the river is “now” called the Tiber. It makes the Tiber a small companion to Jerusalem’s Aelia Capitolina and the like, a single entity carrying a discarded name beside its lasting one, though here the discarding is wrapped in legend rather than politics. Rome kept the memory of the river’s old name precisely as an antiquity, the whitish Albula surviving as a footnote to the Tiber it had become.

The Latin name of the river, Tiberis, the name Rome gave the stream on which it stood and the river-god Tiberīnus it honored. The word is of uncertain origin, probably not Latin at all but pre-Latin and Italic, perhaps Etruscan; Roman legend supplied an eponym, the Alban king Tiberinus Silvius said to have drowned in it and given it his name. The river was central to Rome’s self-image, the flood that bore the infant twins to safety and the highway that carried the city’s trade up from the sea.

Tiberis is the head of the family and the form that endured. Through the Latin it passed into the Greek of the geographers as Tíberis and, by the ordinary descent of Latin into Italian, into the modern Tevere; the river is the “Tiber” of English by the same road. Of the river’s two ancient names it is the younger, the one that displaced the archaic Albula, and it is a quiet instance of how a name of unknown, probably Etruscan origin became, in Roman mouths, one of the most Roman words there is.

Thýbris is the older, poetic Greek name of the Tiber, a form with an aspirated th and a y where the prose Tíberis has plain t and i. It belongs to the Greek poetic and legendary tradition about Italy, and it was from this Greek form that Vergil drew his archaizing Latin Thybris, the name he gives the river-god in the Aeneid, who appears to Aeneas and foretells the founding of Alba and Rome.

Thýbris is the philological gem of this small page. It shows that the Greeks had a name for the Tiber independent of the Latin Tiberis, an older poetic shape rather than a mere transcription, and that a Roman poet then borrowed that Greek form back into Latin to give his river an antique, Hellenic dignity. The Tiber thus runs in two Greek channels at once, the plain Tíberis that copies the Roman name and the lofty Thýbris that Rome’s own national poet preferred, reaching across to Greek to ennoble his native river.

The Greek name of the river, Tíberis, the form in which the Greek geographers and historians of Rome rendered the Latin name. Strabo describes the Tiber and its navigation up to the city; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing his history of early Rome in Greek, uses Tíberis throughout. It is a straightforward transcription of the Latin into Greek letters.

Tíberis is the prose Greek form, beside the older poetic Thýbris, and it shows the river entering the Greek world the way most Italian places did, through the Latin and through the Greek authors who explained Rome to a Greek-reading public. Where the poetic Thýbris preserves an older, independent Greek shape of the name, Tíberis simply follows the Roman one, the river of Rome named in Greek as the Romans named it themselves.