Veii

The Latin name of the city, Veiī, a plural in the manner of Etruscan town-names, the form under which Rome remembered its great early rival and the people, the Veientēs, against whom it fought for generations. Livy’s fifth book gives the climactic war: the ten-year siege that ended in 396 BCE when Camillus took the city, a victory Roman tradition framed as the equal of the fall of Troy and the making of Rome’s power in central Italy.

Veiī is the name that won, because the city that bore it did not. Rome razed Veii, deported its inhabitants, and the place dwindled to a minor town on confiscated land; what endured was the Roman record of the siege and the Latin name in which it was told. The fall of Veii doubled Rome’s territory and is remembered as the moment Rome began to outgrow its neighbors, and the city survives mostly as the first great name in that story of expansion, preserved by the power that ended it.

The Etruscan name of the city is given here as Vei, but with a reconstruction mark, because the city-toponym itself is not directly attested. What the Etruscan inscriptions do record is the goddess Vei, an agrarian and chthonic deity worshipped at the Campetti sanctuary of Veii and identified by the Romans with Ceres and by interpreters with Demeter. The city-name is inferred from hers, on the reasonable assumption that the place was named for, or shared the name of, its presiding goddess.

Vei is an honest gap dressed as a form. Of the three names on this page, the two that are securely attested, Latin Veiī and Greek Ouioí, belong to outsiders; the one that should be the city’s own is the one we cannot quite produce, recoverable only through the name of its goddess and the shape of the foreign forms. It is a fitting condition for Veii, the Etruscan city that Rome destroyed most thoroughly of all: even its name is something we reconstruct from what its enemies and its gods left behind.

The Greek name of the city, Ouioí, the form in which Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing his history of early Rome in Greek, rendered the Latin Veiī; Strabo gives the fuller variant Ouēïoi. The Greek had no native sign for the Latin and Etruscan v (the consonantal w), and so spelled it with the diphthong ou, the regular Greek device for transcribing that sound.

Ouioí is, by an odd turn, the strongest surviving record of Veii’s name outside Latin, stronger than anything in Etruscan, for the city’s own form is unattested and survives only through its goddess. Dionysius and Strabo, Greeks writing about Rome’s past, thus preserve the name of a city that had been destroyed centuries before they wrote, transcribing into their alphabet a place neither they nor anyone else would see again. The Greek transcription of a Roman account of a vanished Etruscan town is, on this page, the clearest the name ever gets.