Aeolus

Aeolus: The Keeper of the Winds

Aeolus (Aiolos), son of Hippotes, was the keeper of the winds who lived on the floating island of Aeolia in Homer’s Odyssey. He gave Odysseus a bag that held the stormy winds, and the crew’s mistake in opening it drove the ships back within sight of Ithaca. Greek writers use the name for other figures too, so it helps to keep them apart.

The Keeper of the Winds

In the tenth book of the Odyssey, Odysseus describes Aeolus, son of Hippotes, as dear to the immortal gods. He lived on a floating island ringed by a wall of unbreakable bronze, with a smooth cliff rising from the sea. His household was unusual: six daughters and six sons, whom he had married to one another, who feasted all day in their father’s halls (Odyssey 10.1–12).

Homer says that the son of Cronus, Zeus, had made Aeolus keeper of the winds, able to still or rouse whichever he wished (Odyssey 10.21–22). He is not the father of the winds, and Homer does not call him a god. Hesiod makes Notus, Boreas and Zephyrus, the winds that help men, the children of Astraeus and Eos (Theogony 378–380), and the fitful, destructive winds the offspring of Typhoeus (Theogony 869–880).

Aeolus and Odysseus

Odysseus and his ships reached the island on their way home from Troy. Aeolus welcomed him for a full month and asked about Troy, the Argive ships and the return of the Achaeans. When Odysseus asked to leave, Aeolus gave him a bag made from the hide of a nine-year-old ox, in which he had bound the paths of the blustering winds. He tied it in the ship with a bright silver cord so that no breath could escape, and sent the West Wind to carry the fleet home (Odyssey 10.14–27).

The ships sailed for nine days and nights. On the tenth, the men could see people tending beacon fires on their own shore. Odysseus, who had held the sheet himself the whole way, fell asleep. His companions, thinking that the bag held gold and silver from Aeolus, loosed it. The winds burst out and swept the ships away from the coast, back to the Aeolian island (Odyssey 10.28–55).

Odysseus went to the palace and found Aeolus feasting with his wife and children. Aeolus refused to help him again. A man whom the gods hate, he said, could not be sent on his way, and Odysseus had to leave without aid (Odyssey 10.56–79). Apollodorus retells the episode in the same form (Epitome 7.10–11). The bag of winds belongs to this episode only; no ancient source gives it to the Argonauts.

Aeolus in Roman Poetry

In Virgil’s Aeneid Aeolus is a king who keeps the struggling winds chained in a vast cavern in Aeolia. Juno comes to him and asks him to loose them against the Trojan fleet, promising him a nymph as his bride, and he answers that his throne and his power over the winds are gifts from her and from Jupiter; the storm he raises is calmed by Neptune, who tells the winds that the sea is his domain and that Aeolus should play the king in his own prison-house of storms (Aeneid 1.50–141). Ovid likewise speaks of Aeolus shutting the winds in his prison (Metamorphoses 1.262–264; 4.663).

Where Aeolia Was

Later writers placed Homer’s island among the volcanic islands north of Sicily. Pausanias says the islands near Lipara were still called, as in Homer, the Islands of Aeolus (10.11.3), and Strabo calls the Liparaean Islands the Islands of Aeolus and names Strongyle, the fiery island, as the place where Aeolus was said to have lived. Strabo adds that the islanders could predict the winds three days ahead from the rumblings and flames of the volcanoes, and that this is why the poet was not speaking idly when he called Aeolus the steward of the winds (Strabo 6.2.10–11).

Diodorus Siculus tells the same story as history. The islands were first settled by Liparus, son of Auson, who gave his name to Lipara; when Liparus was old, Aeolus, son of Hippotes, arrived with companions, married his daughter Cyane and became king of the island, helping Liparus to win a new kingdom around Surrentum in Italy. This, Diodorus says, is the Aeolus to whom Odysseus came: a pious, just and hospitable man who taught sailors the use of sails and had learned, by long observation of the volcanic fire, to predict the local winds accurately, which is why the myth made him “keeper of the winds” (Diodorus 5.7.5–7). His six sons, Astyochus, Xuthus, Androcles, Pheraemon, Jocastus and Agathyrnus, ruled Lipara, parts of Sicily and the Italian coast as far as Rhegium (Diodorus 5.8.1–3).

Other Men Named Aeolus

The name is shared by several figures whom ancient writers themselves tangle together.

• Aeolus, son of Hellen and the nymph Orseis, and brother of Dorus and Xuthus. He ruled around Thessaly and named his people Aeolians. With his wife Enarete, daughter of Deimachus, he had seven sons (Cretheus, Sisyphus, Athamas, Salmoneus, Deion, Magnes and Perieres) and five daughters (Canace, Alcyone, Pisidice, Calyce and Perimede) (Apollodorus 1.7.3). He is the ancestor of the Aeolian branch of the Greeks and has no connection with the winds in Homer.
• Aeolus, the keeper of the winds. Homer and Apollodorus call him simply the son of Hippotes (Odyssey 10.2; Epitome 7.10). Diodorus makes Hippotes a grandson of the first Aeolus through Mimas, king of Aeolis, and names Melanippe as the wind-keeper’s mother (Diodorus 4.67.3).
• Aeolus, son of Poseidon and Arne. In Diodorus the first Aeolus had a daughter Arne, who bore twin sons to Poseidon. Her father did not believe that the god was responsible and sent her away to Metapontium, where she gave birth to Aeolus and Boeotus; the childless Metapontian adopted them. Grown up, the brothers seized power in Metapontium, killed their foster-father’s wife Autolyte in a quarrel over their mother, and fled by sea. This Aeolus took the islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea that were named after him and founded Lipara, while Boeotus returned to Aeolis and gave his name to the Boeotians (Diodorus 4.67.2–6). Diodorus thus has two different Aeoluses settle Lipara; he does not reconcile the two accounts.

Pausanias also knows an Arne, daughter of Aeolus, who gave her name to a city in Thessaly and to the Boeotian town later called Chaeroneia (9.40.5). The Odyssey itself says only that the wind-keeper is Hippotes’ son.

See Also: Odysseus, Odyssey, Zeus, Hera, Anemoi, Typhoeus, Sisyphus, Athamas