Anemoi

Q: Who was Anemoi?

The Anemoi were the Greek wind gods. Hesiod names three of them, Zephyrus, Boreas and Notus, as the sons of the Titan Astraeus and the goddess Eos, while Homer also knows the East Wind, Eurus.

The Anemoi were the Greek wind gods. Hesiod names three of them, Zephyrus, Boreas and Notus, as the sons of the Titan Astraeus and the goddess Eos, while Homer also knows the East Wind, Eurus. Boreas blows from the north, Notus from the south, Zephyrus from the west and Eurus from the east, and each appears in myth as a god with a will of his own.

Parents of the Winds

In the Theogony, Eurybia bore Astraeus to the Titan Crius, and Eos, the Dawn, bore to Astraeus “the strong-hearted winds”: Zephyrus who clears the sky, headlong Boreas and Notus (Hesiod, Theogony 375–380). After them Eos bore the star Eosphorus and the shining stars of heaven. Hesiod adds that the other winds that blow damp and wild over the sea come from the monster Typhoeus, not from the gods, and that only Notus, Boreas and Zephyrus are of divine descent and a great help to mortals (Hesiod, Theogony 869–872). The winds are thus brothers of the Morning Star and the stars.

Family of Anemoi

Parents: Astraeus, Eos
Siblings: Astraea, Phosphorus

See the full family tree

The Four Winds

Homer speaks of four winds in the storm that wrecks the raft of Odysseus: the East Wind, the South Wind, the stormy West Wind and the North Wind “born in the bright air” all fall on the sea together (Homer, Odyssey 5.291–296). Hesiod’s list has no Eurus, and Homer gives no parents for any of them.

Boreas

Boreas, the North Wind, is the best-known of the brothers. In the Iliad he and Zephyrus are said to blow from Thrace (Homer, Iliad 9.4–5), and Homer tells how he fell in love with the mares of Erichthonius, son of Dardanus, and covered them in the shape of a dark-maned stallion; they bore twelve foals that could run over the standing grain without breaking it (Homer, Iliad 20.219–229). In Athenian tradition he carried off Oreithyia, daughter of Erechtheus, while she played by the river Ilissus. She bore him the daughters Cleopatra and Chione and the winged sons Zetes and Calais, who sailed with the Argonauts (Apollodorus, Library 3.15.2). Their fate is told on the page of the Argonauts.

Zephyrus

Zephyrus is the West Wind. Homer makes him the father of Achilles’ immortal horses Xanthus and Balius, whom the Harpy Podarge conceived by him as she grazed by the stream of Ocean (Homer, Iliad 16.149–151). When the pyre of Patroclus would not burn, Achilles prayed to Boreas and Zephyrus. Iris found the winds feasting together in the house of Zephyrus and brought them to the pyre, where they blew all night (Homer, Iliad 23.192–230). In a later telling by Lucian, Zephyrus is jealous of Apollo’s love for Hyacinthus and blows the discus Apollo has thrown so that it strikes the boy on the head (Lucian, Dialogues of the Gods 16). Apollodorus gives only the accident, a cast of the quoit (Apollodorus, Library 1.3.3).

Notus

Notus, the South Wind, has few stories of his own. He appears in the poets chiefly as a force that rises with the others in a storm, as in the Odyssey, where the South Wind throws the raft of Odysseus to the North Wind and the East Wind gives it up to the West (Homer, Odyssey 5.331–332).

Eurus

Eurus, the East Wind, is named by Homer alongside the others (Homer, Odyssey 5.295) and in the Odyssey he melts the snow that the West Wind has piled on the mountains (Homer, Odyssey 19.205–207). He has no parents or myths in the early poets.

Aeolus, Keeper of the Winds

In the Odyssey the winds are kept by Aeolus, son of Hippotes, who lives on a floating island with six sons and six daughters. Zeus has made him steward of the winds, and he can calm or rouse any of them. He gives Odysseus a bag made of an ox-hide in which all the blustering winds are tied up, and sends the West Wind to carry the ships home. When Odysseus' men open the bag, the winds rush out and drive the fleet back to the island (Homer, Odyssey 10.1–76). This Aeolus is a keeper of the winds, not their father.