Aeolus

← Encyclopedia

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 famous Aeolus appears in the tenth book of the Odyssey. Odysseus and his men reach a floating island ringed by a wall of bronze, ruled by a man whom the gods have made steward of the winds — free, the poem says, to rouse or still each one as he pleases. He feasts the wanderers for a month, then sends them on their way with the contrary winds tied up in an oxhide bag, leaving only the west wind loose to carry them home. Within sight of Ithaca, while Odysseus sleeps, his crew open the bag in the belief it holds gold; the freed storms drive the ships back. When Odysseus returns to beg help a second time, Aeolus turns him away as a man the gods plainly hate. In Homer he is not a god but a mortal so favoured that the elements answer to him.

The difficulty is that more than one Aeolus stands in the tradition, and the sources rarely agree which is which. There is the wind-warden of the Odyssey, later named as a son of Hippotes; there is Aeolus the son of Hellen, reckoned the ancestor of the Aeolian Greeks and so the eponym of a whole branch of the nation; and there is at least one further Aeolus in the genealogies. Already in antiquity the strands were tangled, and Roman poets — Virgil among them, who in the Aeneid makes Aeolus a king sealing the winds in a vast mountain cavern at Juno’s request — treated the wind-keeper as a settled divine functionary rather than the borderline mortal of Homer. What scholarship can establish with confidence is the layering: an early figure who governs the winds, gradually fused with and confused for namesakes, and steadily promoted from favoured man toward minor god as the centuries passed.

That promotion is itself the interesting thing. The winds were genuine powers in Greek cult — Boreas, Zephyrus and the rest received offerings, and seafarers had every reason to fear them — and a being set over those powers sits naturally between the human and the divine. Aeolus never acquired temples or a mythology of his own to rival the great gods; he remains, across the sources, 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.

→ Related: Maia · Dione · Callisto · Echo · Antaeus