Zephyrus, Greek god of the west wind and the breath of spring

Zephyrus is the west wind personified, and the most misread of the Greek winds. Modern usage has kept only the mild breeze; the Iliad gives a hard wind that piles up the sea. Son of Eos and brother of Boreas, he is the one Greek god whose character reversed itself over the course of antiquity.

An oriented wind, son of the Dawn

Hesiod lists him, with Boreas and Notus, among the children of the Titan Astraeus and the Dawn (Theogony 378-380). These three are the regular winds: they blow from a fixed quarter and return with the seasons. The poet contrasts them explicitly with the squalls descended from Typhoeus, which strike at random and destroy ships.

Zephyrus lives in Thrace with his brothers — it is in his house that Iliad 23 has them feasting when Iris brings them Achilles’s prayer for the pyre of Patroclus. Counter-intuitive for a west wind, but Homer thinks like a poet rather than a cartographer: the winds are a household, and kinship counts for more than the map.

Homer’s Zephyrus: harsh, not soft

In the Iliad, Zephyros is a storm wind. He blows with Boreas on the pyre, drives the swell against the ships, shrieks — Homer applies to him the epithet dusaês, “ill-blowing,” and ranks him among the winds sailors fear.

A single passage anticipates the mildness he will later acquire, and it is set outside the world: in the description of Elysium that Proteus gives Menelaus in Odyssey 4, Ocean sends up unceasing breezes of Zephyrus to refresh men (4.566-568). Elysium has no snow, no winter and no rain, only that breath.

The gap between the two uses is the heart of the god. The west wind brings Greece its Atlantic rain and its equinoctial gales; it also brings, when spring returns, the end of the bad season. Rome settled the matter by renaming him Favonius, “the favourable,” and Pliny dates to early February the day this wind opens the farming year. The breeze won — and the grain harvest fixed the god’s memory.

Sire of the immortal horses

His most famous fatherhood is equine. In Iliad 16, Homer explains the origin of Xanthus and Balius, the two immortal horses yoked to Achilles’s chariot: the Harpy Podarge, grazing in a meadow beside the stream of Ocean, conceived them by Zephyrus.

The genealogy matches the one given for Boreas, sire of Erichthonius’s foals: in Greek thought winds beget horses because they are speed itself. Xanthus will later be given brief speech by Hera to warn Achilles of his coming death — the horse born of wind is also the horse that knows.

The death of Hyacinthus: two versions

The most dramatic myth attached to Zephyrus is also the one where the sources contradict each other most sharply, and the comparison repays attention.

In Ovid (Metamorphoses 10.162-219) the death of Hyacinthus is pure accident: Apollo throws the discus, it rebounds off the ground and strikes the young man in the face; the god, unable to save him, raises from his blood the flower that bears his name. No third party is involved.

In Lucian (Dialogues of the Gods 14) and Philostratus (Imagines 1.24) the cause is entirely different: Zephyrus loved Hyacinthus, the boy preferred Apollo, and the jealous wind deflected the discus in mid-air to bring it down on the one who had refused him.

Both traditions circulate side by side in later antiquity. The jealous-wind version has the advantage of supplying a culprit and turning an accident into a divine crime of passion; Ovid’s has the opposite advantage, making Apollo responsible without being guilty, which is precisely the engine of his narrative. Neither can be presented as the version of the myth.

Chloris becomes Flora

Ovid tells the other great Zephyrus myth elsewhere, and this time he lets the goddess speak. In the Fasti (5.195-220), Flora explains her own origin: “I was Chloris, who am now called Flora.” A nymph of the blessed fields, she was seen by Zephyrus, pursued, carried off — and then married. The wind, she says, made amends for his violence: he gave her as a settlement dominion over all flowers and a garden in perpetual spring.

The story produced one of the most reproduced images in European painting. In Botticelli’s Primavera (c. 1480) the right-hand third of the panel unfolds the scene in three stages: a blue, wind-swollen Zephyrus bursts from the trees, seizes the nymph Chloris whose mouth breathes out flowers, and Chloris becomes Flora, the crowned woman scattering roses. A single painting holds the abduction, the metamorphosis and the outcome.

Iris, Eros and Psyche

Two minor traditions finish the portrait. Alcaeus makes Eros the child of Zephyrus and Iris — a rare pedigree, but a coherent one: desire born of the warm wind and the rainbow.

And in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, it is Zephyrus who, at Cupid’s order, lifts Psyche from the edge of the crag where she has been exposed and sets her down gently in the valley of the invisible palace. The west wind serves there as a wedding conveyance: his narrative function is to carry without harming, which is the exact inverse of the Homeric Zephyros.

Afterlife: from the Tower of the Winds to a shirt fabric

On the Tower of the Winds in Athens (first century BC), Zephyrus takes the western face: a near-naked youth with spread wings, carrying an armful of flowers in a fold of his cloak — opposite a bearded, heavily booted Boreas. The sculpted opposition states the whole contrast between the two brothers.

The name has survived everywhere except in mythology: zephyr means a light breeze, and since the nineteenth century a fine, soft cotton cloth chosen for its lightness. Of Homer’s gale nothing remains but a summer shirt.

Further reading

For the mother of the winds, see Eos; for the brother who holds the opposite face of the Tower of the Winds, Boreas. For the god whose love Zephyrus’s jealousy cuts short, see Apollo. For the blessed country his breezes cool in Homer, see Elysium, and for the god who describes it to Menelaus, Proteus.