Zephyrus

Also Known As: Greek Ζέφυρος, Zephyros, “the west wind”; Roman Favonius, from *favere*, “to favour”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the west wind itself, the breath that ends winter and quickens growing things, swift enough to sire the fastest horses in the world.
Role in Mythos: Zephyrus is the seasonal wind of spring among the four Anemoi, a divine force answerable to prayer rather than command, and the jealous rival in the death of Hyacinthus.
Relation to Humans: Sailors and farmers welcomed his arrival as the opening of the season, and Achilles poured wine to him from a golden cup when a funeral pyre would not catch. He carries mortals gently when he chooses to, and he is entirely capable of killing one on a whim.

On the octagonal marble tower that still stands in the Roman Agora at Athens, eight winds fly around the frieze in a slow procession, and one of them is carrying flowers. He is young. His legs are bare, his cloak gathered up and spilling loose blossoms, as though he had come straight from a field and could not be troubled to set them down. The others carry hail, or a scorching brazier, or a jar tipped for rain. That one is Zephyrus, and the sculptor’s choice tells you exactly what a Greek expected of the west wind. It brings the spring.

Hesiod gives him a parentage fit for weather. In the Theogony he is the son of Astraeus, the dusk-Titan of stars, and of Eos the dawn, born alongside Boreas of the north and Notus of the south. Three brothers whose father is evening and whose mother is morning, which is a tidy piece of theological engineering: the winds come from the place where the sky turns over. Eurus of the east was added later to fill out the compass, and he alone of the four never got a season.

Zephyrus got the best one. When Homer needs a place past all suffering he reaches straight for him. At the ends of the earth lies the Elysian plain, where there is no snow, no hard winter, no rain at all, and Ocean sends up the shrill west wind to cool the men who live there forever. It is a small, telling detail. Paradise in the Odyssey is not still air. It is air moving, from one particular direction, all year.

The Iliad shows him at home. When Patroclus lay on a pyre that would not light, Achilles stood apart from the burning and poured wine on the ground from a golden cup, calling on the north wind and the west and promising them offerings. Iris carried the message. She found the winds all feasting together in the house of gusty Zephyrus and stopped on the stone threshold, and the moment they saw her they leapt up, every one of them shouting for her to sit beside him. She would not stay. The two winds went out over the sea, the swell rising white ahead of them, and fell on the pyre until the flame roared all night and Patroclus burned.

He was not always gentle. Ovid puts the story in Flora’s own mouth in the Fasti, on the third of May, and lets her tell it lightly, which somehow makes it worse. She was Chloris then, a nymph of the fortunate fields. It was spring, she was wandering, Zephyrus saw her, she ran, and he was the stronger. He had precedent: his brother Boreas had carried Oreithyia bodily out of her father’s house in Athens and nobody had stopped him either. Afterwards Zephyrus made what amends a god makes, and gave her the name of wife, and a garden that flowers in every season, and dominion over every blossom in it. Chloris became Flora. She says she has no complaint. The poem does not press her on it.

Their son was Carpus, fruit itself walking about in the shape of a beautiful boy, and Nonnus tells how he drowned in a river and how his companion Calamus went into the water after him and came up as the reed that grows along the bank. Other genealogies attach Zephyrus to Iris, the rainbow, and make the pair parents of Eros, which is a startling claim to find in Alcaeus and one that almost nothing else in Greek literature repeats.

The strangest offspring came from a harpy. Homer says the immortal horses Xanthus and Balius, who drew Achilles’ chariot at Troy and wept over the body of Patroclus, were conceived by storm-footed Podarge as she grazed in a meadow beside the swirling stream of Ocean, and that their father was the west wind. Greek horse-breeders genuinely believed that mares could be got in foal by turning them to face the wind, so the parentage was not a poet’s flourish. It was an explanation for speed.

Which brings the matter of Hyacinthus, and the version of Zephyrus that the earlier sources do not contain at all. Ovid tells the Spartan prince’s death as an accident: Apollo threw the discus, the boy ran in under it, the bronze came down and broke his skull, and the god’s own hands could not stop the bleeding. No wind in it. Only later, in Lucian and in Philostratus, does a fourth figure enter the field. Philostratus describes a painting of it, and the description is precise enough to see. Apollo stands mid-throw with his eyes still on the mark. Zephyrus hangs above the ground with his cheeks full, blowing. The discus turns in the air. The boy has not yet understood that he is falling, and the blood already leaving him is gathering into the flower that will carry the mark of grief on its petals.

He killed the boy because the boy preferred someone else.

That is the whole of his power, really, expressed twice. He moves things through the air, and the difference between a blessing and a killing is only which way he decides to lean. He can lift a girl off a cliff and set her down on flowering turf without waking her, as he does for Psyche in Apuleius, and he can put the same breath under a bronze plate and open a skull with it. He has no weapons and needs none.

His limits are the ones weather has. He cannot be commanded, only asked, and asking costs wine and a promise. He is bound to one quarter of the horizon and largely to one season, so for most of the year he simply is not there. And he does not come to everyone who calls. Psyche’s sisters, having seen him carry her once, threw themselves off the same rock expecting the same soft hands, and the air stayed empty, and they went down onto the stones.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Zephyrus in Greek mythology?

Zephyrus is the Greek god of the west wind, one of the four Anemoi who each govern a quarter of the horizon. Hesiod names him a son of the Titan Astraeus and the dawn goddess Eos, alongside his brothers Boreas and Notus. He is the wind of spring, and the Romans called him Favonius.

What is Zephyrus the god of?

Zephyrus is the god of the west wind and of the spring it brings. Ancient writers treated his arrival as the end of winter and the opening of the sailing and growing season, and Homer places his breeze in Elysium, where it blows year-round to cool the blessed dead.

Did Zephyrus kill Hyacinthus?

In the later versions of the story, yes. Ovid tells the Spartan prince’s death as a pure accident during a discus throw by Apollo, but Lucian and Philostratus add Zephyrus as a spurned rival who blows the discus off course so that it strikes Hyacinthus in the head. The jealousy motive is a development of the myth, not its earliest form.

Who was Zephyrus married to?

Zephyrus carried off the nymph Chloris by force and afterwards made her his wife, giving her rule over all flowers; as Flora she tells the story herself in Ovid’s Fasti. Their son was Carpus. He is also named as the mate of the harpy Podarge, on whom he fathered Achilles’ immortal horses Xanthus and Balius.

Why did Achilles pray to Zephyrus?

The funeral pyre of Patroclus would not catch fire, so Achilles poured libations from a golden cup and promised offerings to Boreas and Zephyrus. Iris carried the request to the winds, who were feasting in Zephyrus’s house, and the two of them crossed the sea and blew on the pyre until it burned through the night.