Naming the Tiber

The names of places and the stories that surround them are important for a historians understanding of the site’s earliest history. With the far-reaching history of Rome, it should be no surprise that the city’s Tiber River has one as well. Etymologists know that before the Romans were the Romans, when the Alban kings ruled the area, that originally called the river Albula or white, this is also where the Alban people took their name. This was due to the high sediment content of the river which causes the water to look milky and cloudy. In Roman antiquity the Tiber would often be nicknamed flauuis or Tiberius Flauuis, the Latin word for yellow, as an ode to this odd river colour.

Statue of the Tiber God outside the Capitoline Museum
(Photo by Author)

But how did the Tiber become the Tiber then? The most common legend states that the river changed names when the ninth Alban king Tiberinus Silvius fell in and drowned whilst crossing in the tenth century BCE. Although this creates an interesting story, etymologists believe that the name Tiberinus is a derivation of Tiber and not the reverse, and where the word Tiber comes from is, unfortunately, unknown. They do believe however, that it stems from the same root of the praenomen Tiberius, as well as its Etruscan equivalent.

 Eventually, the Alban king Tiberinus was converted into the Roman deity of the river, Tiber Pater, and was venerated and sacrificed to, especially on his festival day May 14^th, where a man bundle was thrown into the river as an allegorical sacrifice. His temple was, fittingly, on Tiber Island.

Bibliography

            Chase, George Davis. "The Origin of Roman Praenomina." Harvard Studies in Classical                            Philology 8 (1897): 103. doi:10.2307/310491. 

Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Roman Antiquities, Volume I: Books 1-2. Translated by Earnest                       Cary. Loeb Classical Library 319. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937.