The North Wind, son of Astraeus and Eos the Dawn, headlong in his course, who blows the bitter frosts across horse-breeding Thrace and stirs up the wide sea.1
Hesiod sets his birth among the strong-hearted winds: Eos the Dawn, mating in love with Astraeus, bore brightening Zephyrus and Boreas, headlong in his course, and Notus. These three, he says, are a god-sent kind and a great blessing to men, unlike the fitful gusts that work havoc on the sea.2
His nature is northern and cruel. In the farmer's calendar Hesiod marks the wretched month Lenaeon, when the frosts are bitter as Boreas blows over the earth: he comes across horse-breeding Thrace upon the wide sea and stirs it up, while earth and the forest howl, and falling on many a high-leafed oak and thick pine he brings them crashing down in the mountain glens.3
Apollodorus tells how the wind bound himself to Athens. While Orithyia, daughter of Erechtheus, was playing by the Ilissus river, Boreas carried her off and lay with her, and she bore the daughters Cleopatra and Chione and the winged sons Zetes and Calais. These sons sailed with Jason and met their end chasing the Harpies, though Acusilaus, whom Apollodorus cites, held that Heracles killed them in Tenos.4
Apollonius sharpens the seizure: Thracian Boreas snatched Orithyia away from Cecropia as she was whirling in the dance hard by the Ilissus, and she bore him the winged Boreads on the verge of wintry Thrace. Years after, when his sons held back the search for Heracles after lost Hylas, a bitter vengeance came upon them: returning from the games over dead Pelias, Heracles slew them in sea-girt Tenos and heaped two columns above their grave.5
Ovid tells the same abduction as a wooing turned to force. Mighty Boreas desired Orithyia, but King Tereus and the Thracians long stood between the god and his beloved, and entreaty won nothing; so the wind fell back on his own nature, raised his force in fury, and snatched her bodily through the air to the Ciconian walls of Thrace, where she bore him the twin boys, born wingless until eagle's plumage came upon them once their golden hair and beards were grown.6
⁂
the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
