Anemoi

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Winged wind gods who command the four directional winds and the seasons each wind carries.
Role in Mythos: They personify the cardinal winds, delivering the year’s weather and acting as agents of greater gods and of answered mortal prayers.
Relation to Humans: Sailors and farmers prayed, poured libations, and sacrificed to them for fair winds, and were saved or wrecked at their pleasure. Athens credited Boreas with destroying the Persian fleet in 480 BC and built him a shrine on the banks of the Ilissus.

The pyre would not light. Patroclus lay on stacked timber beneath the walls of Troy while the flames guttered and died in the still air, so Achilles stood apart with a golden cup, poured wine into the dirt, and called the north wind and the west wind by name, promising rich offerings if they came. Iris carried the message. She found the Winds at a feast in the hall of Zephyrus, declined a seat, and told them what was wanted. Boreas and Zephyrus rose at once, drove the clouds before them across the open sea, and fell upon the pyre, and the fire roared until morning with the two winds shrieking around it.

The Greeks gave their winds names, parents, grudges, and appetites. The Anemoi were the gods of the four directional winds: Boreas the north wind, who came down cold out of Thrace with winter on his breath; Zephyrus the west wind, mildest of the brothers, who carried spring and the early summer breezes; Notus the south wind, heavy with the wet storms of late summer and autumn that rotted crops and drowned fleets; and Eurus, the wind of the east or southeast, the unlucky one, attached to no season and trusted by no sailor.

Hesiod made them sons of Astraeus, the Titan of the dusk stars, and Eos, goddess of the dawn, born where night hands the sky over to morning. He counted only three of them, Boreas, Zephyrus, and Notus, as gods whose coming could bless. The wild ruinous gusts that drop on the sea out of nowhere and smash ships he called another breed entirely, children of the monster Typhoeus. Eurus is the odd man out in every accounting, missing from the Theogony and the Orphic Hymns both, a wind the poets acknowledged and the genealogists never quite seated at the family table.

Vase painters and mosaicists knew each brother on sight. They appear as winged men with robes snapping in their own weather: Boreas wears a thick beard and a shaggy cloak, Zephyrus comes garlanded and trailing flowers, Notus tips a water jar and pours the rain out of it, Eurus arrives unkempt, his hair in a storm tangle. A second tradition made them horses, stabled on the island of Aeolia by Aeolus Hippotades, the Reiner of Horses, and turned out to graze along the shore of the river Oceanus at the rim of the world. The two shapes bleed into one another. Boreas in stallion form covered twelve mares belonging to Erichthonius of Troy, and the colts he sired could run across a field of standing grain without bending an ear of it. Zephyrus fathered Xanthus and Balius, the immortal horses of Achilles, on the harpy Podarge. On an ordinary autumn evening Notus simply does his work: the southern sky goes the color of wet slate, the air turns warm and thick, and the rain comes in off the sea in long grey sheets that hiss against the harbor stones.

Boreas had the most dealings with mortals, and the roughest manners. He courted Oreithyia, daughter of the Athenian king Erechtheus, and when persuasion got him nowhere he took her the way wind takes anything, snatching her from the banks of the Ilissus in a whirl of cold air and carrying her to Thrace. She bore him winged sons, Zetes and Calais, who sailed with the Argonauts and chased down the Harpies. The marriage eventually paid off for Athens. In 480 BC, with the fleet of Xerxes bearing down on Greece, an oracle advised the Athenians to call on their son-in-law; they prayed, and a gale off Cape Sepias hammered the anchored Persian ships against the rocks for days, wrecking hundreds. Herodotus reports the story and admits he cannot say whether Boreas did it. The Athenians had no such doubts and raised the god a shrine on the Ilissus, near the spot where he had taken the girl. The Delphians, told by their own oracle that the winds would prove great allies of Greece, built the Anemoi an altar at Thyia and sacrificed there.

Zephyrus, the gentle one, owns the cruellest story. He loved the Spartan youth Hyacinthus and lost him to Apollo, and when god and boy were throwing the discus together, the west wind bent its flight so that it struck Hyacinthus in the skull and killed him. Jealousy travels at whatever speed the air does. He fared better with Chloris, a nymph of green and growing things; he carried her off, made her his wife, gave her dominion over flowers, and she bore him Karpos, whose name means fruit.

The Odyssey shows what the winds looked like from below. Aeolus, their warden, penned every contrary wind in a bag of ox hide, left only Zephyrus loose to push the ships home, and handed the bag to Odysseus. After nine days of fair sailing Ithaca stood close enough that the crew could see men tending fires on the shore. Then Odysseus slept, his men opened the bag expecting silver, and every wind in the world came out at once and blew them all the way back. The bag was leather, and the winds fit inside it. That detail says a great deal about their standing: gods, certainly, but gods who could be sacked up by a warden with a good appointment.

Later weather science complicated the family. Lesser winds filled the compass points between the brothers, and in the Roman Agora at Athens the astronomer Andronicus of Cyrrhus raised an octagonal tower of Pentelic marble, finished by about 50 BC, with a water clock inside, sundials on its faces, and eight winds carved in relief around the top: Boreas, Kaikias, Apeliotes, Eurus, Notus, Lips, Zephyrus, and Skiron, each flying with the equipment of his own weather. Eurus drifts between east and southeast depending on who is drawing the compass card. The tower is still standing. The Romans took the four over wholesale as the Venti, renaming them Aquilo, Favonius, Auster, and Vulturnus.

Their powers were the weather itself. They could raise or flatten a sea, lock a country in frost, open the spring, burn a pyre to ash overnight, and hold a three-day storm on an anchored fleet until the hulls split. They flew, they took horse shape at will, they sired horses faster than wind has any business making, and they listened, which mattered most of all, because a god who listens can be hired with libations, lambs, and an altar in the right place.

But the Anemoi sat low in the divine hierarchy and knew it. Zeus outranked them, Aeolus held their keys, and they could be bound, bagged, bribed, and redirected by anyone with the right standing or the right sacrifice. Their obedience to a well-made prayer was almost mechanical: Achilles asked for fire and they gave him fire until dawn. Quarrelsome among themselves and bound each to his own quarter of the sky, they never combined into anything greater than weather. That was exactly why the Greeks dealt with them. A wind with a name, a father, and a wife is a wind that can be talked to, flattered, and hired away from the enemy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Anemoi?

The Anemoi are the Greek gods of the four directional winds: Boreas the north wind, Zephyrus the west wind, Notus the south wind, and Eurus the east or southeast wind. Each was a distinct god with his own temperament, season, and myths, usually depicted as a winged man and sometimes as a horse. The Romans adopted them as the Venti.

Who are the parents of the Anemoi?

In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Anemoi are sons of Astraeus, the Titan of dusk and the stars, and Eos, the goddess of dawn. Hesiod names only Boreas, Zephyrus, and Notus as their children; Eurus does not appear in the Theogony, and the destructive storm winds were said to be offspring of the monster Typhoeus instead.

What does each of the Anemoi control?

Boreas brings the cold north wind of winter, Zephyrus brings the mild west wind of spring and early summer, and Notus brings the wet southern storms of late summer and autumn. Eurus, the east or southeast wind, is attached to no season and was regarded by Greek sailors as unlucky.

How were the Anemoi worshipped in ancient Greece?

The Anemoi were honored with prayers, libations, altars, and animal sacrifice, both as a group and individually. After a storm wrecked much of the Persian fleet in 480 BC, the Athenians built a shrine to Boreas on the Ilissus river, and the Delphians, advised by their oracle, raised an altar to the winds at Thyia.

What is the Tower of the Winds?

The Tower of the Winds is an octagonal marble clocktower in the Roman Agora of Athens, designed by the astronomer Andronicus of Cyrrhus and completed by about 50 BC. Its frieze carries relief carvings of eight wind gods, including all four Anemoi, and the building housed a water clock and exterior sundials. It still stands today.