Zephyrus

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Zephyrus is the Greek god of the west wind, gentlest of the Anemoi — the four brothers who personify the directional winds. Where Boreas of the north is harsh and Notus of the south brings storms, Zephyrus is the wind of late spring and early summer: the warm air that thaws the ground, scatters the clouds, and is said in the poets to coax the year’s first growth from the earth. The Romans called the same wind Favonius, the favouring one, and kept the association with renewal.

The early genealogy is fixed by Hesiod’s Theogony, which makes the winds sons of Astraeus, a Titan of the dusk, and Eos, the dawn. That parentage places Zephyrus among the older cosmic forces rather than the Olympians, a power of the world’s weather more than a god with temples and a cult. He has little independent worship; he lives chiefly in the poets and in the way the Greeks spoke of the sky. In the Iliad he is invoked alongside Boreas to quicken the funeral pyre of Patroclus, the winds attending the rites of heroes.

What myth he carries is mostly bound to other figures. He is named as husband of Chloris, the nymph of flowers whom the Romans identified with Flora; through her he is tied to the greening of the fields his wind announces. He is also fixed in the story of Hyacinthus, the Spartan youth loved by Apollo. In the version that came down through the poets, Zephyrus loved the boy as well, and when Hyacinthus chose Apollo, the slighted wind turned the god’s thrown discus in the air so that it struck and killed him — the hyacinth flower springing from the spilled blood. The gentlest of the winds, in that account, is also capable of a jealous and lethal turn.

Later allegory found him useful. Hellenistic and Roman art gave the winds recognisable forms, and Zephyrus appears as a winged figure with cheeks full or a youth scattering blossoms — the image that survived into Renaissance painting, where he blows the newly born goddess to shore at the edge of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. In that long afterlife he becomes less a god to be reckoned with than a fixed sign for one thing: the moment the cold breaks and the season turns. The name itself has outlasted the worship. A zephyr, in ordinary English, is simply a soft west wind, the god worn down into a word for the weather he once governed.