Boreas was the ancient Greek god of the cold north wind and the bringer of winter, one of the most powerful and feared of the wind gods. Where the gentler breezes coaxed the seasons forward, Boreas came howling down from the mountains of the far north, stripping the trees bare, freezing the rivers, and driving snow before him. The Greeks pictured him as a wild and untamed force of nature, quick to anger and terrible in his strength, yet also a god who could be honoured, petitioned, and even claimed as a kinsman by the people of Athens.
God of the North Wind
As the personification of the north wind, Boreas ruled the season of winter and the icy blasts that swept across the Greek world from the mountainous regions beyond. His breath brought the killing frost, and sailors and farmers alike learned to dread the moment his gales rose over the horizon. Boreas was said to dwell in Thrace, a cold and rugged land to the north of Greece that the Greeks imagined as the very source of winter’s chill. From his home among its frozen peaks and caves he stormed forth, and his fierce, violent temperament matched the harshness of his domain. Of all the winds he was the strongest and the most tempestuous, a god who took what he wanted by force rather than persuasion.
The Anemoi and His Family
Boreas was one of the four chief Anemoi, or wind gods, who each governed one of the cardinal directions. His brothers were Zephyrus, the mild west wind that heralded spring; Notus, the wet and stormy south wind that brought the late-summer rains; and Eurus, the unlucky east wind. Together the four brothers divided the compass among them, though Boreas and his siblings were often depicted as rivals in temperament as much as in direction.
Their parents were the Titan Astraeus, god of the dusk and the stars, and Eos, the rosy-fingered goddess of the dawn. As children of a Titan and the dawn, the winds belonged to that older order of nature deities who embodied the great rhythms of the sky. It was fitting that the god of the stirring winds should be born of the union of nightfall and morning, for the winds themselves seemed to rise and fall with the turning of the heavens.
The Abduction of Oreithyia
The most celebrated of Boreas’s myths tells of his love for Oreithyia, a princess of Athens and daughter of King Erechtheus. According to the legend, Boreas first courted her gently, hoping to win her hand through soft words and pleading. But wooing did not come naturally to so violent a god, and when his suit was refused he resolved to act according to his nature. As Oreithyia played and danced upon the banks of the river Ilissus, Boreas swept down in a dark whirlwind, wrapped her in a cloud, and carried her off to his northern home in Thrace, where he made her his wife.
From their union came a remarkable set of children. Their twin sons were the winged Boreads, Zetes and Calais, who inherited their father’s power of flight and later sailed among the heroes of the Argonauts, famously driving off the monstrous Harpies who tormented the blind seer Phineus. Boreas and Oreithyia also had two daughters, Chione, who became the mother of a son by the sea god Poseidon, and Cleopatra, who married Phineus himself. Through these children the fierce north wind was woven into some of the greatest sagas of Greek heroic legend.
Boreas and Athens
Because Boreas had taken an Athenian princess for his bride, the people of Athens came to regard him as a relative by marriage, and this kinship took on great significance during the Persian Wars. When the fleet of the Persian king Xerxes bore down upon Greece, the Athenians are said to have prayed to Boreas for aid. A tremendous storm duly arose off the coast, wrecking a large portion of the Persian ships and crippling the invasion. Grateful for his intervention, the Athenians honoured Boreas as a kind of protector and built him a shrine on the banks of the Ilissus, the very river from which he had once snatched Oreithyia. Few gods enjoyed so direct a claim on the gratitude of a Greek city.
Boreas was also closely linked with horses, an association that captured the swiftness and raw energy of the wind. In one tradition he took the form of a dark-maned stallion and, coupling with the mares of a mortal herd, sired twelve immortal colts so fleet of foot that they could gallop across fields of grain without bending the ears or skim over the sea without wetting their hooves.
Depiction and Roman Equivalent
In art and poetry Boreas was portrayed as a strong, winged, bearded old man with shaggy hair and billowing robes that streamed behind him as he flew. His powerful frame and thick beard, often rimed with frost, conveyed both age and unstoppable vigour. In some archaic depictions his lower body tapered into a pair of serpent tails rather than legs, marking him as a primordial and monstrous force, and he was sometimes shown with snowy or wintry features to signal the cold he carried with him. His posture was almost always one of violent motion, wings spread and cloak whipping, as if the very image could not contain his energy.
To the Romans, Boreas was known as Aquilo, the cold northern gale of their own skies. Under either name he remained the same untameable spirit of winter, a reminder that the winds, for all their usefulness to sailors and farmers, answered to no one but themselves.