Sabus is a character in the mythology of the Sabines of Italy, the son of the god Sancus (called by some Jupiter Fidius). According to Cato, writing in his work Origines, the Sabines took their name from his.
However, Zenodotus of Troezen holds that the Sabines took their name from the already-existing name of their place of habitation. And according to contemporary legend (unsubstantiated and presumably untrue), the Sabines were descendants of Spartan colonists led by a person named Sabus, and took their name from him.
According to Henry Alleyne Nicholson, Sabus is related to the Egyptian Sobek and other entities from other cultures.
References
- ^ Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1937). Roman Antiquities, Volume I, Books 1-2. Loeb Classical Library, Number 319. Earnest Cary (translator). Harvard University Press. p. 453 (Book II, paragraph 49). ISBN 978-0674993525. Retrieved April 18, 2015.
- Salmon, E. T. (1967). Samnium and the Samnites. Cambridge University Press. p. 30. ISBN 978-0521135726. Retrieved April 18, 2015.
- Cornell, T. J., ed. (2014). The Fragments of the Roman Historians. Oxford University Press. p. 98. ISBN 978-0199277056. Retrieved April 19, 2015.
- Nicholson, Henry Alleyne (1873). Contributions to a Fauna Canadensis: Being an account of the animals dredged in Lake Ontario in 1872. University of Michigan Library. p. 542. ISBN 978-1130228496. Retrieved April 19, 2015.