Tiber- Roman LocationLocation · Landmark"Father Tiber"

The River God

Before Rome existed, the river was called the Albula. According to Livy, it took its later name from the Alban king Tiberinus, who drowned in its waters and was honored thereafter as its divine guardian. The Romans addressed him as Pater Tiberinus and spoke to him as they would to a living elder.

Savior of the Twins

The Tiber's defining act was receiving the infant twins Romulus and Remus. When King Amulius of Alba Longa ordered the babies drowned, his servants placed them in a basket and set it on the swollen river. Rather than swallowing the children, the Tiber's waters receded and deposited the basket at the foot of the Palatine Hill beneath the Ficus Ruminalis, the sacred fig tree, near the entrance to the Lupercal cave where the she-wolf would find and nurse them.

The Dream of Aeneas

Virgil gives the most vivid portrait of the river god. In Book 8 of the Aeneid, Tiberinus rises from his waters to appear before Aeneas in a dream: a venerable old figure draped in grey-green linen, his hair crowned with shady reeds, rising among the poplar leaves. He tells the Trojan hero to seek alliance with the Arcadian king Evander, whose settlement stands on the very site of future Rome. When Aeneas wakes and sets out upstream, Tiberinus calms his current so completely that the river lies still as a peaceful pool, and the ships glide forward without effort.

The Rites of the River

Each year on May 14 and 15, the Vestal Virgins walked to the Pons Sublicius, Rome's oldest bridge, and threw straw effigies called Argei into the current below. The origin of the rite was already obscure to the Romans themselves. The bridge was sacred. The Pontifices, the "bridge-builders," took their title from the duty of maintaining it, and no iron could be used in its construction or repair. When the Tiber flooded, which it did often and sometimes catastrophically, Romans read the surge as the god's anger and sought expiation through sacrifice and prayer.