Nerusii

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Nerusii were a Ligurian tribe living in the Alpes Maritimae during the Iron Age. Pliny mentions them as Nerusi. Some scholars, like Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel, think the name means “the manly ones,” from a root meaning man, and the personal name Nerusius appears at Magliano and Rusellae. The ethnonym is sometimes linked to the deity Nerius of Néris-les-Bains. They appear late in the list of tribes on the Tropaeum Alpium, before the Velaunii and Suetrii, without a precise homeland.

Ptolemy assigns their chief town to Vintium (modern Vence), which helps define their territory as the area that later became the civitas Vintiensium and the diocese of Vence. Their old borders ran east along the Var to its junction with the Estéron, west along the Loup to its source on the Audibergue, and north along the ridges of Thorenc and Cheiron. These medieval borders already matched the earlier Roman territory of the Nerusii. Pliny lists them as one of the Alpine tribes conquered by Rome in 16–15 BCE, and their name was engraved on the Tropaeum Alpium.