Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Cleopatra (Boreas).
The gallery
The Boreads Rescuing Phineus from the Harpies (Attic red-figure hydria, Louvre G364)
The Leningrad Painter (attributed), c. 460 BCE
On this Attic red-figure vase the winged Boreads, Zetes and Calais, swoop in from left and right to drive the Harpies away from the seated, blinded seer Phineus. The scene belongs directly to Cleopatra's saga: the Boreads are her brothers, sons of Boreas the North Wind and Orithyia, and Greek tradition makes their intervention at Phineus' table the moment they confront the king who wronged their sister and her children. Though Cleopatra herself does not appear, the image preserves the family at the heart of her story, where her brothers act for the honour of their bloodline. The vase is held in the Louvre's Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities in Paris.
Phineas and the Sons of Boreas
Sebastiano Ricci, c. 1695
Sebastiano Ricci's late-Baroque canvas stages the violent climax of the Phineus legend, in which the winged Boreads drive the snatching Harpies from the blind Thracian seer's feast. The brothers Zetes and Calais are the sons of Boreas and Orithyia and thus the siblings of Cleopatra, Phineus' first wife; their dramatic rescue is the act that ties them back to the household into which their sister married and whose ruin she suffered. Ricci renders the airborne struggle in swirling diagonals and luminous colour characteristic of his Venetian manner. The painting is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession no. 1980.275).
Calaïs and Zetes Deliver Phineus from the Harpies
Bernard Picart, early 18th century
This copperplate engraving by the French printmaker Bernard Picart, made to illustrate Ovid's Metamorphoses, shows the winged sons of Boreas, Calais and Zetes, pursuing the Harpies away from the blind prophet Phineus as he sits at his perpetually defiled table. As the Boreads are the brothers of Cleopatra, daughter of Boreas and Orithyia and Phineus' first wife, the engraving visualises the strand of myth in which her own kin intervene in the affairs of the husband who, by tradition, had her sons blinded. Picart's precise line-work translates the airborne combat into the measured classical idiom of early-eighteenth-century book illustration.