Aeolus

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Aeolus is the keeper of the winds in Greek myth — the figure who, in Homer’s Odyssey, holds the gales of the sea in his keeping and can grant or withhold them at will. He is among the most economical inventions in Greek storytelling: a single office, the controlling of the winds, attached to a name that ancient writers then struggled to keep straight.

The Odyssey: a man the winds obey

The famous Aeolus appears in the tenth book of the Odyssey. Driven from the land of the Cyclopes, Odysseus and his men come to a floating island, Aiolia, that rides the sea behind an unbroken wall of bronze set on a sheer cliff. The man who lives there is no god. He is a mortal whom the deathless gods have made steward of the winds, free — the poem is precise on this — to rouse or still each one as he pleases. He keeps a closed household of twelve: six sons married to six daughters, an unbroken circle that feasts the year round behind the bronze. Into this enclosure the wanderer comes, and is received.

For a full month Aeolus entertains his guest, drawing from him the whole tale of Troy and the long return. Then he sends the company on its way, and his parting gift is the strangest in the poem. He flays a nine-year-old ox and stows inside its hide the blustering winds, the storm-makers that beat ships off their course; he binds the bag with a bright silver cord so that not a breath can escape; and he leaves loose only the west wind, the gentle Zephyrus, to blow the fleet straight home. Nine days and nights they run before it. On the tenth the smoke of Ithaca rises ahead, the watch-fires of the home island near enough to make out — and Odysseus, who has held the helm the whole way without sleeping, at last lies down.

While he sleeps the crew turn on the bag. They have watched their captain hoard it the length of the voyage and have decided it holds silver and gold, the treasure of Aeolus, to be carried home for him alone. They loose the silver cord. The winds burst out together, seize the ships, and drive them weeping back the way they came — back across all the won distance to Aiolia itself. Odysseus returns to the bronze wall a suppliant a second time, and this time the steward of the winds will not have him. To shelter a man so plainly loathed by the blessed gods, Aeolus says, would be an offense; and he sends him from the island. The gift that should have closed the journey instead reopens it. Of the whole homecoming, this is the moment most often remembered: the harbor in sight, the helmsman asleep, the bag undone by the people he was bringing home.

What matters in Homer’s handling is the standing of the man himself. Aeolus does not command the winds because he is divine. He commands them because the gods have appointed him to, the way a king holds a city by a grant he did not make. The elements answer to him, yet he can be wrong about the gods’ favor, can read a returning guest as cursed, can shut a door. He is a mortal lifted to the edge of the divine and left standing there — the steward, not the source.

The tangle of namesakes

The difficulty that runs through the whole tradition is that more than one Aeolus stands in it, and the sources rarely agree which is which. At least three are distinguishable, and antiquity itself kept losing the thread between them.

There is the wind-warden of the Odyssey, whom Homer names only by his patronymic, Hippotades — son of Hippotes — and never as a god. There is Aeolus the son of Hellen and the nymph Orseis, brother of Dorus and Xuthus: this is the eponym of the Aeolian Greeks, the ancestor through whom one of the great divisions of the nation traces itself, and the founder of a teeming dynasty. To him the genealogists give a long line of children — among the sons Sisyphus, Athamas, Salmoneus, Cretheus; among the daughters Canace and Alcyone, the woman whom grief for her drowned husband turns into a kingfisher. And there is a further Aeolus in the genealogies, the son of Poseidon and Arne, set in the western islands. The three pull in different directions — one rules weather, one founds a people, one anchors a local pedigree — and yet they bleed into one another constantly, because the name is the same and the geography overlaps.

Already in antiquity the strands were knotted. The mythographers tried to sort them, sometimes by making the wind-keeper a descendant of the eponym, sometimes by keeping them flatly separate; the rationalizing historian Diodorus Siculus went the other way and folded them toward a single man, a just and pious king of the islands later called Aeolian who studied the winds by signs in fire, taught the islanders to read the weather and to sail by it, and was remembered in legend as their lord. That is euhemerism doing its usual work — a god dissolved back into a clever king — but it registers something real about the figure: even the ancients could not decide whether Aeolus was a person, an office, or a force of nature wearing a name.

From favored man to divine functionary

Roman poetry settled the question by promotion. In the first book of the Aeneid, Virgil takes the borderline mortal of Homer and makes him a king set over the storms by the highest god under a fixed covenant — empowered to tighten and slacken the winds at command — and he gives him a fixed address. The winds no longer ride loose in an oxhide; they are shut in a vast mountain cavern, a living prison where they roar against the rock, and Aeolus sits enthroned above them with his scepter, holding their fury down. When Juno, hunting the Trojan fleet, comes to him and asks for a wreck, she comes as one power petitioning another, and she pays in the coin gods use: the nymph Deiopea, the loveliest of her train, offered to him in marriage. Aeolus opens the mountain; the storm falls on Aeneas; and only Neptune, rising in anger from his own element, beats the winds back and stills the sea.

The contrast with Homer is the whole point. The wind-keeper of the Odyssey is a man so favored that the elements obey him, who can still be mistaken about heaven and can turn a suppliant away in fear of the gods’ displeasure. Virgil’s Aeolus is a settled divine functionary with a throne, a domain, and a contract of office, transacting on equal terms with the queen of the gods. The line of development from one to the other is exactly what scholarship can establish with confidence: an early figure who governs the winds, gradually fused with and confused for his namesakes, and steadily raised from favored man toward minor god as the centuries pass (Gantz, Early Greek Myth, 1993). The bronze-walled island becomes a mountain dungeon; the steward becomes a king; the grant becomes a covenant.

The winds beneath him

That promotion is itself the interesting thing, and it follows the logic of what sits below the office. The winds were genuine powers in Greek cult, not figures of speech. Boreas the north wind, Notos the south, the gentle west wind Zephyrus and the rest were the Anemoi, sons of the dawn and the dusk, and they received what powers receive. An altar stood to them at Thyia near Delphi; sacrifice was made to turn their violence aside; the rule the sources preserve is that the destroying winds took black victims and the kindly ones white. When the Persian fleet bore down on Greece, the Athenians prayed to Boreas as a kinsman by marriage and credited the storm that broke the enemy ships to his answer; he kept a shrine on the river Ilissus for it. To seafarers the winds were the nearest of the divine forces, the ones that decided in an afternoon whether a man came home, and they were feared and fed accordingly.

A being set over powers like these belongs by nature between the human and the divine, and that is exactly where every version of Aeolus is found. He has no genealogy of cult to rival the Olympians — no great temple, no festival, no body of myth that is his own rather than the winds’. Even where worship gathers near his name, as on the volcanic islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea that took the name Aeolian and remembered a lord of the winds among their early kings, it is the winds, the smoking earth, and the harbor that draw it, with Aeolus standing over them as the one who holds the latch. He remains across the whole tradition an office more than a personality, the answer to a sailor’s oldest question of who, if anyone, holds the weather. The image that lasted is the plainest one: a bag of winds, opened too soon, and a homecoming undone within sight of the shore.

Texts and scholarship

The two founding accounts are the Homeric and the Virgilian, and the distance between them is the subject. The Aeolus episode occupies the opening of Odyssey 10 (lines 1–79), where the steward is a mortal Hippotades behind a bronze wall; the Aiolia of that passage is the bench against which every later version is measured. The promotion to enthroned king of a wind-filled cavern is the work of the first book of the Aeneid (1.50–86), Virgil’s deliberate elevation of the Homeric figure into a divine functionary serving the will of Juno. Between the poems stand the mythographers and the rationalizers: the Library ascribed to Apollodorus, which fixes the dynasty of Aeolus son of Hellen and so the separate genealogical strand, and the Library of History of Diodorus Siculus, which collapses the figures toward one euhemerized king of the islands who taught navigation by the winds.

The standard modern synthesis of all three figures and their conflations is Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), which traces the layering of the wind-keeper, the eponym, and the genealogical Aeolus through the literary record and disentangles where antiquity fused them. For the cult of the winds that underwrites the office, the relevant testimony is gathered around the Anemoi: the sacrificial regime and the wind-altars are preserved in Pausanias and the periegetic tradition, and the kinship of Boreas with Athens belongs to the same body of evidence. The catalog of primary citations for both Aeolus and the wind-gods is assembled at the Theoi Project, which collects the Homeric, Virgilian, Apollodoran, and Diodoran passages in translation with their references.

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