Zephyrus

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The Greeks read the sky by where the wind came from. Each of the four quarters had its breath and its temper, and the four were brothers — the Anemoi, the named winds. From the north came Boreas, cold and headlong, the wind that stripped the trees and froze the passes. From the south came Notus, heavy with the late-summer storms that rotted the grain and drove ships onto the rocks. From the east came Eurus, the unlucky quarter, blamed for foul weather. And from the west came Zephyrus — the warm wind that broke the cold, scattered the clouds, and was said in the poets to draw the year’s first green out of the ground. Among the four he is the favoring one. The Romans called him Favonius, from favere, to favor, and kept exactly that sense: the wind that comes when the season turns, the breath of late spring and early summer.

Genealogy and rank

The early pedigree is fixed by Hesiod’s Theogony. In the catalog of the Titans’ descendants, Eos the dawn bears to Astraeus — a Titan of the starred dusk, himself the son of Crius and Eurybia — the strong-blowing winds: Zephyrus, Boreas, and Notus. The pairing is itself a piece of cosmology. The winds are born of the dusk and the dawn, the two edges of the day; they are older than the Olympian order, powers of the world’s machinery rather than gods who sit on thrones. Hesiod is careful, too, to keep these named winds apart from the lawless, ship-wrecking gusts he derives from the monster Typhoeus. The Anemoi are the orderly winds, the ones that keep their quarters and their seasons; the rest are weather without a name, and without a master.

That placement explains a fact about Zephyrus that holds across his whole career: he is everywhere in the poetry and almost nowhere in the cult. As a pre-Olympian nature-power rather than a city’s patron, he drew no cult of his own; where the winds were honored at all they were honored together, and chiefly in emergencies — the Athenians, for instance, kept a gratitude toward Boreas after a storm wrecked a Persian fleet — and Zephyrus shares in that diffuse, occasional reverence rather than holding any of it singly. His monument, such as it is, is architectural: the octagonal Tower of the Winds in the Roman Agora at Athens, raised by Andronicus of Cyrrhus around the first century BC as a combined sundial, water-clock, and weather-vane, carries on its frieze the eight winds of the developed scheme, Zephyrus carved on the western face as a youth with a fold of his robe full of spring flowers, spilling them onto the world below. It is the clearest single image the ancient world left of what he was for: the wind that arrives with the blossom.

In Homer

Homer gives Zephyrus his two most vivid appearances, and they pull in opposite directions — one tender, one ferocious. In the Iliad, when the funeral pyre of Patroclus will not catch, Achilles stands apart and prays to Boreas and Zephyrus, pouring wine from a golden cup and promising them offerings if they will come and make the wood burn. The messenger Iris carries the prayer. She finds the winds at a feast in the house of Zephyrus, the lord of the western gales, and they rise the moment she crosses the threshold; the two of them sweep down together and drive the flames through the night until the body is consumed. It is one of the rare passages where the named winds act as persons, with a house, a table, and a court — kept, even there, in their character as forces summoned for a task rather than gods petitioned in a shrine.

The other Homeric Zephyrus is the sire of horses. In the catalog of Achilles’ team, the immortal pair Xanthus and Balius are got by Zephyrus on the harpy Podarge, who conceived them grazing in a meadow by the stream of Ocean. The genealogy is exact to the wind’s nature: the horses are bred for unearthly speed, born of the swift air out of a storm-spirit, and they run, in Homer’s phrase, as fast as the gales themselves. Here the gentle west wind is also the racing one, the breath that outpaces everything alive.

Marriage to Chloris, and the green of the fields

Zephyrus is named as husband of Chloris, the nymph of flowers and new growth, whom the Romans identified with their own goddess Flora. The fullest telling is Ovid’s, in the fifth book of the Fasti, where the goddess explains her own origin: she was once Chloris, a nymph of the blessed fields, until the west wind saw her in spring, pursued her, and seized her — and then made amends for the violence by taking her as his bride and giving her dominion over all that flowers. The Greek name Chloris, from the word for the fresh green of new leaves, becomes the Latin Flora; and the marriage seals what the myth had always implied, that the wind which announces the spring is wedded to the spring itself. Through her, Zephyrus is bound to the greening he carries: he is the breath, she is what the breath calls up from the ground. The pairing gave the Renaissance one of its favorite emblems of fertile spring, and it sits at the center of the next chapter of his afterlife.

Hyacinthus: the gentlest wind that kills

Against all of this — the favoring wind, the husband of flowers, the breath of renewal — stands the one myth in which Zephyrus is the agent of a death. The youth Hyacinthus of Sparta was loved by Apollo, and the two were companions; but in the version that came down through the poets, chief among them Ovid in the tenth book of the Metamorphoses, Zephyrus loved the boy as well, and was refused for the bright god. While Apollo and Hyacinth threw the discus together, the slighted wind caught the spinning disk in the air and turned it back, so that it struck the youth in the head and killed him. From the blood Apollo raised a flower, the hyakinthos, and the poets read on its petals the marks of his grief. The gentlest of the four winds, in that account, is also the jealous and lethal one — the same soft air that quickens the fields turning a discus to murder. The contradiction is not a flaw in the figure; it is the figure. A wind is what it is whether it carries pollen or carries a blade of bronze off its line, and the myth simply holds the two faces of the same power against each other and declines to choose.

Texts and scholarship

The whole of Zephyrus rests on a handful of passages, and the editions of those passages are the place to read him cleanly. The genealogy stands in Hesiod, at Theogony 378–380, where Eos bears the winds to Astraeus; the standard public-domain English is Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s 1914 Loeb, navigable line by line in the Perseus Digital Library, and the indispensable scholarly apparatus is M. L. West’s Hesiod: Theogony, Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), which sorts the catalog of winds from the nameless storm-gusts and traces the genealogy’s logic. For the cult-historical frame — why a cosmic wind-power left almost no temple behind — Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical (Harvard University Press, English ed. 1985) remains the orienting survey of how the Greeks divided worship between the Olympian gods and the older powers of nature. The two Homeric scenes — the pyre at Iliad 23 and the siring of the horses at Iliad 16 — are read in the same Perseus corpus and in A. T. Murray’s Loeb Iliad. The marriage to Chloris is told only in Ovid’s Fasti 5.195–220, available in James George Frazer’s 1931 Loeb and in A. S. Kline’s open translation; the Hyacinthus death is in Metamorphoses 10.162–219. The developed eight-wind scheme survives in stone in the Athenian Tower of the Winds, the first-century-BC horologion of Andronicus of Cyrrhus, whose western relief gives Zephyrus his most concrete ancient portrait.

The artistic afterlife

Hellenistic and Roman art had already given the winds recognizable bodies — winged, cheeks full, or in Zephyrus’s case a youth scattering blossoms — and that iconography passed intact into the Renaissance. It reaches its most famous form at the left edge of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, where a winged Zephyrus, entwined with a second airy figure usually read as the breeze Aura or as Chloris herself, blows the newborn goddess — Venus, risen from the sea — across the water to the shore on a current of roses. The same pair, transformed, anchors the right side of Botticelli’s Primavera: there Zephyrus seizes the fleeing Chloris, and from her mouth the flowers of her metamorphosis spill toward the figure of Flora beside her, the whole Ovidian story of the wind, the nymph, and the goddess compressed into a few feet of canvas. In both paintings Zephyrus does the same office he did in Homer’s pyre and Hesiod’s catalog — he is the mover, the breath that brings the scene to life from the side. From the painters he passed into ordinary speech: a zephyr, in plain English, is a soft west wind, and the word is now read as a synonym for mildness, for the gentlest stirring of warm air.

The softening of the name is also, quietly, a forgetting. The figure beneath the word was never only mild. He is the brother of the wind that freezes and the wind that wrecks; he sires horses that run faster than anything mortal; and in the one story where his will is crossed, he kills with a thrown discus and walks away. A god with no temple and no priests survives, in the end, not in worship but in poetry and paint and in the single word for the air he governs — and the word keeps only the kindest of his faces, the spring breeze, while the rest of him goes on blowing, off to one side, through every picture in which a season turns at his breath.

→ Related: Apollo · Hyacinth · Flora · Venus · Iris · Amyclae