Everyone knows the name of Rome, because it is on maps, coins, road signs and … a few thousand years of history books. Yet several ancient writers insist that this famous name was only the public one. Behind it, they say, sat another name for the city, a name so closely guarded that even writing about it was treated as dangerous.
Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, mentions it almost in passing while listing the towns of Italy. When he arrives at Rome he stops short, and writes that Rome is the city “whose other name” the sacred rites forbid anyone to speak. Then he adds a single sentence about a man named Valerius Soranus. Soranus, Pliny says, “dared to divulge it, but soon did he pay the penalty” for doing so.
That is the whole story in Pliny’s encyclopedia, and he moves on to the city gates. Pliny gives no name, no date and no method of punishment, as though his readers already knew what he meant.
They probably did, since the same tale turns up in Plutarch, a Greek writer working at roughly the same time, and again in later Latin authors who were still repeating it centuries afterward. The details shift from one author to the next, but the core does not change, because Rome had a name that must never be spoken, and the man who spoke it is said to have died for it.
Why would a city hide its own name, when Romans were not a shy people, carving their achievements into stone, stamping their gods on coins and marching their victories through the streets? A secret at the heart of all that display is hard to explain.
Pliny drops a hint in a different book of his work, and so does Plutarch. Both connect the secret to a ritual the Romans practiced in wartime. The Romans had a name for it, evocatio, which means a calling out.
What the Roman priests were calling out, and what they feared someone might call out of Rome, is the key to the whole puzzle. So is the question of who Soranus really was, and whether a city’s name could truly get a man killed.
