Boreas

The north wind and his family

Boreas is the north wind, made a god. The early Greek poet Hesiod makes him a son of Eos, the Dawn, and Astraeus, a god of dusk. His brothers include Zephyrus, the west wind, and Notus, the south wind. The same parents produce the Morning Star and the other stars, so the winds and the lights of the sky belong to one family.

This family tree sets these winds apart from another kind. The god Zeus defeats the monster Typhoeus. Hesiod then says the harmful gusts that scatter ships and destroy crops come from the monster, except for Notus, Boreas and clear Zephyrus. Boreas can still do great damage, as the wrecked Persian ships later show. But he belongs to the ordered world of the gods, not to the aimless storms outside it.

As the north wind, he is both a direction and a force. The myths give that force a body that can desire, father children and take sides, and they never make it gentle.

Oreithyia beside the Ilissos

Apollodorus, whose Library retells the Greek myths, tells how Boreas takes a wife. Oreithyia, daughter of the ancient king Erechtheus of Athens, is playing beside the Ilissos, a river in Athens. Boreas carries her off.

They have four children. Their daughters are Cleopatra and Chione. Their sons, Zetes and Calais, have wings. The two sons sail with Jason and chase the creatures called the Harpies away from the blind prophet Phineus.

The ancient writer Plato sets his dialogue the Phaedrus in the same part of Athens. In it, Phaedrus asks Socrates whether the abduction happened beside the clear stream where they stand. Socrates places it farther downstream, near the crossing to Agra. He says an altar of Boreas is somewhere nearby.

Socrates then considers a down-to-earth explanation. Perhaps a gust pushed Oreithyia from the rocks, and her death was later told as a god carrying her off. Socrates declines to spend his life explaining away every strange creature and story in this way. The conversation keeps both the places and an ancient doubt. Athens could point to the spot without needing one account of what happened there.

The storm at Artemisium

The marriage matters again in the war against the Persians. Herodotus tells the story in his Histories. A storm rises off Euboea while the Athenian fleet waits near Chalcis. Across the water, hundreds of Persian ships lie exposed along the coast of Magnesia. The Athenians make sacrifices and call on Boreas and Oreithyia to destroy the invading fleet.

Their reason is family. An oracle, a god’s answer to a question, has told them to call on their son-in-law. Boreas has an Athenian wife, so he is the son-in-law of the city. Ships break against the Sepian headland and are driven ashore while the north wind blows for three days.

Herodotus does not confirm that a god caused the storm. He records what the Athenians claimed and what happened. They believed Boreas had helped them once before, at Athos, and helped again at Artemisium. When they returned home, they set up a precinct, a sacred enclosure, for Boreas beside the Ilissos. It recorded their thanks for the help they believed they had received.

From abductor to ally

The abduction of Oreithyia is an act of force against a daughter of Athens. In Herodotus, the marriage that followed lets Athens address Boreas as an ally. The city turns a violent union into a claim on the wind. A wind feared for its violence is brought into the city’s family and given a place on its ground.

The river holds both sides of the story. Beside the Ilissos, Boreas takes Oreithyia. Beside the same river, the city later honours him. A myth of seizure becomes part of the city’s religion, and the weather becomes a relative the city can ask for help when enemy ships approach.

Boreas stays dangerous. The Athenian story does not say that the north wind has grown gentle. It says his violence can be turned away from the city and towards the fleet that threatens it.