Aura

Aura (“breeze”) was a Phrygian huntress of Titan birth, the personification of the morning air. In the epic Dionysiaca of Nonnus she is a huntress, a companion of Artemis, whose story ends in tragedy; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses “Aura” is the breeze that the hunter Cephalus calls to, with fatal consequences for his wife Procris.

Family

Nonnus makes Aura the daughter of the Titan Lelantos and Periboia, a daughter of Oceanus (Dionysiaca 48.242–248), and places her home in Phrygia, where she hunted over the foothills of Mount Dindymon by the river Rhyndacus. Her name, he says, matched her ways: she could run as fast as the mountain winds (48.254–257). Her name is also the ordinary Greek word for a light wind, and the plural aurai (breezes) was used of winds and wind-nymphs in general, so the name sits between a person and a natural force.

Aura and Dionysus

In Book 48 of the Dionysiaca Aura is a fierce virgin hunter who serves Artemis and prides herself on her boyish strength. Bathing with the goddess, she mocks Artemis for having the soft, rounded breasts of a woman rather than the body of a true virgin (48.302–369). The insulted Artemis appeals to Nemesis, who refuses to turn Aura to stone out of respect for her Titan birth but promises that the huntress who reproached the goddess’s virginity will be a virgin no longer (48.375–470). Dionysus, struck by desire through the work of Eros, makes a spring of wine rise in her path. Aura drinks, is overcome by sleep, and the god binds her hands and feet and violates her as she sleeps (48.570–651).

When she wakes and understands what has happened, Aura goes mad and kills every herdsman, farmer, hunter and vintager she meets, because each trade had once served love (48.652–691). She bears twin sons, from whom Nonnus derives the name of Mount Dindymon (48.848–855). In her rage and shame she lays the babies in a lioness’s den, then snatches one back, hurls it into the air and devours it; Artemis seizes the other and carries him to his father Dionysus (48.910–927). Dionysus gives the boy to the nymph Nicaea to nurse, then presents him at Athens to Athena, who suckles him and hands him to the Bacchants of Eleusis: he is Iacchus, honoured there as a third Dionysus after Zagreus and the son of Semele (48.948–968). Aura herself throws her bow and quiver into the river Sangarios and leaps in after them, and Zeus changes her into a spring, her body becoming the stream and her breasts the spouts of its water (48.928–942).

The Breeze in Ovid

In Book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (lines 690–862), the Athenian Cephalus tells how he hunted all day and, weary in the heat, lay in the shade and called to the breeze, asking Aura to come and soothe him, to come into his breast. Someone overheard him and reported to his wife Procris that her husband was talking lovingly to a woman called Aura. Procris fell into a faint, and then, half unwilling to believe it but still suspicious, crept into the woods at dawn to watch.

When Cephalus called out again, Procris stirred in the leaves. Thinking it was a wild animal, Cephalus threw the unerring javelin that he owned, and it struck her in the breast. Dying, she learned that her rival had been only the wind. Ovid does not make Aura a goddess here; she is the breeze itself, addressed as if it were a person.

See Also: Lelantos, Artemis, Dionysus, Iacchus, Cephalus, Procris, Anemoi, Eos