Boreas: Greek God of the North Wind

The Story of Boreas

Boreas was the god of the cold north wind, the bringer of winter. He was a son of the Titan Astraeus and Eos, the goddess of the dawn, and the brother of the other three winds. He lived in Thrace, the wild land to the north of Greece.

Boreas fell in love with Oreithyia, a princess of Athens, but her father, King Erechtheus, kept refusing him. Tired of asking, the north wind swept down, wrapped her in his dark wings and carried her off to Thrace to be his wife. Their sons Zetes and Calais were born with wings and later sailed with the Argonauts.

Boreas could also take the form of a horse. In the Iliad, he took the form of a stallion and fathered twelve swift foals with the mares of King Erichthonius. These horses were so light that they could run across fields of grain without bending a stalk.

When the Persians invaded Greece, the Athenians prayed to Boreas as their relative by marriage, because of Oreithyia. According to Herodotus, a fierce northern storm wrecked many Persian ships off the coast. The grateful Athenians built him a shrine by the river Ilissus.

Artists showed Boreas as a strong, bearded man with wild hair and wings, wrapped in a cloak, sometimes blowing a conch shell. His name lives on in the word boreal, meaning northern, and in the aurora borealis, the northern lights. The Romans called him Aquilo.