Boreas (Ancient Greek: Βορέας, romanized: Boréas; also Βορρᾶς, romanized: Borrhâs) is the Greek god of the North Wind, Storms, Winter, Ice, Snow, Cold, Frost, Absence, Sadness, Loneliness and Calmness.
He is the brother of the other winds (Zephyrus, Notus and Eurus), the Astra Planeta (the planets), and Astraea. Boreas is the father of Khione by the nymph Oreithiya. His Roman counterpart is Aquilo.
Boreas and his brother Zephyrus enjoyed travelling to Troy and impregnating the mares on the plains. Two children of Boreas, Calais and Zetes, help the Argonauts on their journeys.
Description[]
Boreas is depicted as being very strong, with a violent temper to match. He was frequently shown as a winged old man or sometimes as a young man with shaggy hair and beard, holding a conch shell and wearing a billowing cloak. Pausanias wrote that Boreas had snakes instead of feet, though in art he was usually depicted with winged human feet. In ancient art, he is usually depicted as a bearded older man.
Pliny the Elder in his Natural History on Book IV.35 and VIII.67[1] thought that mares might stand with their hindquarters to the North Wind and bear foals without a stallion. The Greeks believed that his home was in Thrace, and Herodotus and Pliny both describe a northern land known as Hyperborea "Beyond the North Wind" where people lived in complete happiness and had extraordinarily long lifespans.
Family[]
Boreas, like the rest of the wind gods, was said to be the son of Eos, the goddess of the dawn, by her husband Astraeus, a minor star-god.[2] He is thus brother to the rest of the Anemoi (the wind gods), the five star-gods, and the justice goddess Astraea.
Boreas was closely associated with horses, storms, and winter. He was said to have fathered twelve colts, after taking the form of a stallion, to the mares of Erichthonius, king of Dardania. These were said to be able to run across a field of grain without trampling the plants. He is said to have fathered three giant Hyperborean priests of Apollo by Chione.
Mythology[]
Oreithyia[]
Boreas was said to have kidnapped Oreithiya, an Athenian princess, from the Ilisos. Boreas had taken a fancy to Orithyia and had initially pleaded for her favors, hoping to persuade her. When this failed, he reverted to his usual temper and abducted her as she danced on the banks of the Ilisos. Boreas wrapped Orithyia up in a cloud, raped her, and with her, Boreas fathered two sons—the Boreads, Zethes and Calais, who were part of the crew of the Argo as Argonauts[3]—and two daughters—Chione and Cleopatra.
From then on, the Athenians saw Boreas as a relative by marriage. When Athens was threatened by Xerxes, the people prayed to Boreas, who was said to have then caused winds to sink 400 Persian ships. A cult was established in Athens in 480 B. C. E. in gratitude to the Boreas for destroying the approaching Persian fleet. A similar event had occurred twelve years earlier, and Herodotus writes:[4]
- Now I cannot say if this was really why the Persians were caught at anchor by the stormwind, but the Athenians are quite positive that, just as Boreas helped them before, so Boreas was responsible for what happened on this occasion also. And when they went home they built the god a shrine by the River Ilissus.
Two other cases of Boreas being honored by Greek states for similar assistance have been described, in Megalopolis (against Laconia)[5] and in Thurii (against Syracuse). The latter case had Boreas being granted citizenship and a land plot.[6]
The abduction of Orithyia was popular in Athens before and after the Persian War, and was frequently depicted on vase paintings. In these paintings, Boreas was portrayed as a bearded man in a tunic, with shaggy hair that is sometimes frosted and spiked. The abduction was also dramatized in Aeschylus's lost play Oreithyia.
Other love affairs[]
In some versions of Hyacinthus's story, Boreas supplants his brother Zephyrus as the wind-god that bore a one-sided love for the beautiful Spartan prince, who preferred Apollo over him.[7]
In other accounts, Boreas was the father of Butes (by another woman) and the lover of the nymph Pitys. In one story, both Pan and Boreas vied for Pitys's affections, and tried to make her choose between them. To impress her, Boreas uprooted all the trees with his might. Pan only laughed, and Pitys chose him instead of Boreas. Angry, Boreas chased Pitys down and threw her off a cliff, killing her. Gaia, pitying the girl, changed her dead body into a pine tree.[8]
Phineus with the Boreads
During the journey of the Argo, Argonauts Zetes and Calais, Boreas's sons, describe Apollo as "beloved of our sire", perhaps implying a romantic connection between the two gods.[9]
King Erichthonius of Troy had in his possession three thousand mares. Boreas fell in love with them as they pastured in the grasslands, and took the form of a dark-maned stallion in order to mate with them. Thus he fathered twelve colts on these mares.[10][11] In the words of William Smith, this was "commonly explained as a mere figurative mode of expressing the extraordinary swiftness of those horses."[11]
Other traditions[]
Boreas is featured in the oldest tale concerning the creation of the cypress tree; the myth goes that in order to honour his dead daughter Cyparissia, Boreas planted a new tree, the cypress. The inclusion of Boreas in the story continues the pattern of a wind god appearing in the story of a plant (like he does in the story of Pitys, or Zephyrus in the stories of Cyparissus and Hyacinthus).[12][13]
When the goddess Leto, pregnant with Artemis and Apollo, was due, Boreas was ordered by Zeus to bring her to Poseidon, who in turn led her to the island of Ogygia where she could give birth to the twins, as Zeus' wife Hera had ordered all places and land to shun Leto.[14]
In an Aesop fable, Boreas and his uncle Helios the sun god argued about which one between them was the strongest god. They agreed that whoever was able to make a passing traveler remove his cloak would be declared the winner. Boreas was the one to try his luck first; but no matter how hard he blew, he could not remove the man's cloak, instead making him wrap his cloak around him even tighter. Helios shone bright then, and the traveler, overcome with the heat, removed his cloak, giving him the victory (the moral being that persuasion is better than force).[15]
According to Pausanias, Boreas blessed Musaeus with the gift of flight.[16]
When Sirius, the dog star, began to burn hot after he could not have his beloved Opora, a minor goddess connected to the harvest, Boreas dealt with the intense heat by ordering his sons to deliver Opora to Sirius, while he cooled the earth down with blast of cold wind.
Outside Greco-Roman culture[]
Greek deities were abundantly used in Greco-Buddhist art, so too Boreas and its velificatio depiction element. Boreas became the Japanese wind god Fujin through the Greco-Buddhist Wardo/Oado and Chinese Feng Bo/Feng Po ("Uncle Wind"; among various other names).
Gallery[]
External links[]
References[]
- ↑ Pliny the Elder Natural History, Book IV.35, Book VIII.67
- ↑ Hesiod, Theogony 378, Hyginus, Preface; Nonnus, 6.18
- ↑ Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 1.211–223 & 2.231–239; Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.9.16; Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca historica, 4.44.2
- ↑ Herodotus, Histories 7.189.3
- ↑ Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.36.6
- ↑ Aelian, Historical Miscellany 12.61
- ↑ Smith 1873, s.v. Hyacinthus.
- ↑ Libanius, Progymnasmata, 1.4
- ↑ Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 4.465
- ↑ Homer, Iliad 20.219
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Smith 1873, s.v. Boreas.
- ↑ Asclepiades FGH 12 F 19
- ↑ Forbes Irving, Paul M. C. (1990). Metamorphosis in Greek Myths, p. 261. Clarendon Press. p. 240. ISBN 0-19-814730-9.
- ↑ Hyginus, Fabulae 140
- ↑ Aesop, Fables 183
- ↑ Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.22.7