Tiberinus- Roman GodDeity"Father Tiber"

The King Who Became the River

Roman tradition held that the Tiber had not always borne its name. The river was originally called the Albula, and it received its new name from Tiberinus Silvius, a king of Alba Longa in the dynasty descended from Aeneas. Livy writes that Tiberinus drowned in the river during a battle or while crossing it, and thereafter the stream was called Tiberis in his honor. Macrobius adds that the drowned king was received among the gods as the river's presiding deity.

The River Speaks

In the eighth book of the Aeneid, Tiberinus rises from the water before Aeneas as an old man crowned with reeds, his body draped in a grey-green mantle. He tells the Trojan hero to take heart, that the land will be his, and instructs him to sail upstream to the Arcadian settlement of Pallanteum to seek the alliance of King Evander. To prove his authority, Tiberinus calms his own current so the Trojan ships can travel upriver without effort, the waters lying as still as a pool.

Rites at the River

Each May, the pontiffs walked to the Pons Sublicius and threw argei into the current. These were rush figures shaped like bound men, an offering to Tiberinus in a ceremony so old that Romans themselves could not explain its origins, as Festus records. The Tiber shaped the founding legend too: when the infant twins Romulus and Remus were set adrift, the river flooded its banks and left the basket in the shallows beneath the Ficus Ruminalis, where the she-wolf found them.