Zephyrus

Zephyrus was born to Astraeus, the Titan god of the dusk and the stars, and Eos, the goddess of the dawn whose rosy fingers stretched across the eastern sky each morning to announce the sun. His brothers were the other three winds: Boreas, the violent north wind who swept down from Thrace in winter storms; Notus, the south wind who brought the sultry rains of late summer; and Eurus, the east wind who blew from the direction of the rising sun. Together the four Anemoi were the breath of the sky itself, each with his own temperament and season. Zephyrus was the gentlest of the four, the wind of spring and early summer, who blew from the west where the sun set and carried the warmth of the ocean across the lands of Greece. While Boreas howled and Notus thundered, Zephyrus whispered. He moved through the meadows like a sigh, bending the grass and opening the petals of roses and hyacinths.

In the earliest accounts, Zephyrus was a force of nature rather than a character with a story. But as Greek mythology grew more elaborate, the poets gave him a personality and a history. He fell in love with Chloris, a nymph of the spring meadows who would later become the goddess Flora in Roman tellings. He swept her up in a warm gust of wind and carried her through the sky, and when they landed she was transformed into a goddess, the queen of all flowers. From their union came the bounty of the spring: the first roses, the first crocuses, and every blossom that opened its face to the west wind. In some versions, Zephyrus was also the father of Carpus, the god of fruit, who gave his name to the English word for the edible yield of plants. The west wind did not merely bring spring, he was the father of its abundance.

Zephyrus played a crucial role in one of the most famous love stories of Greek mythology. When Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, grew jealous of the mortal princess Psyche, whose face had drawn worshippers away from the goddess's temples, she commanded her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with a monster. But Eros fell in love with Psyche himself and carried her to a hidden palace on a mountain peak. It was Zephyrus who lifted the sleeping princess from the rocky cliff and bore her gently through the air, setting her down in the golden garden where invisible servants would attend her. Later, when Psyche's jealous sisters convinced her to betray Eros and the palace vanished, it was Zephyrus who caught her when she threw herself from the mountain in despair, lowering her to the riverbank below so that her search could begin. Without the west wind, the story of Psyche would have ended before it began.

But Zephyrus was not always gentle. In one of the most tragic stories of Greek myth, he was the rival of Apollo, the Olympian god of music, prophecy, and the sun, for the love of Hyacinthus, a beautiful Spartan youth of such extraordinary loveliness that even the gods desired him. Hyacinthus chose Apollo, and the god taught him to throw the discus, the heavy bronze disc that athletes hurled in the sacred games. One day, as Apollo threw the discus for Hyacinthus to catch, Zephyrus, driven mad with jealousy, blew a sudden gust of wind that sent the discus veering off course. It struck Hyacinthus in the head and killed him instantly. Apollo wept over the body and transformed the fallen youth into the flower that bears his name, the hyacinth, whose petals are said to bear the marks of the god's tears. Some tellers blame the accident on Boreas or on the west wind as an impersonal force, but in the most vivid versions, Zephyrus himself is the jealous lover whose grief becomes murder.

Zephyrus was also the father of two of the most famous horses in Greek mythology. The Harpy Podarge, a winged storm-spirit with the face of a woman and the body of a bird, was grazing in the form of a mare by the river Oceanus when Zephyrus, in the shape of a stallion, approached her. From their union came Xanthus and Balius, the immortal horses who would later be given to the hero Peleus, the king of the Myrmidons, and then passed to his son Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Trojan War. These horses could run across water and speak with human voices, and they wept at the death of Patroclus, the beloved companion of Achilles, before the walls of Troy. The west wind had given the Greek army its swiftest cavalry, and his breath lived in the nostrils of the horses who carried the greatest hero of the age.

In later ages, the Romans called him Favonius, the favourable wind, and his image appeared on coins and in poetry as the herald of spring. The poet Ovid, writing in the first century CE, described him as the wind that opened the buds and scattered the seeds. In Renaissance art, he was painted as a winged youth blowing flowers from his mouth across the landscapes of Botticelli and his followers. Today, the word zephyr still means a gentle breeze, and meteorologists use his name to describe the mild west winds that bring spring to the coasts of the Mediterranean. He is the only one of the four great winds whose name has become a word for something pleasant, a reminder that not all forces of nature are violent, and that even the gods of storm could whisper.