Daughter of Erechtheus, king of Athens, carried off from beside the Ilissus by Boreas the North Wind. To him she bore the winged Boreads Zetes and Calais, who sailed with the Argonauts and drove off the Harpies.1
Apollodorus reckons Orithyia among the daughters of Erechtheus by Praxithea, daughter of Phrasimus by Diogenia, daughter of Cephisus — sister to Procris, Creusa, and Chthonia. Of these sisters she alone, he notes, was carried off by Boreas, while the others were given to mortal husbands.2
While Orithyia was playing by the river Ilissus, Boreas carried her off and lay with her, and she bore 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 instead that Heracles killed them in Tenos.3
Apollonius sharpens the scene: the Thracian wind snatched her from Cecropia as she was whirling in the dance hard by the Ilissus' stream, and bearing her far off begat the Boreads on the verge of wintry Thrace.4
Ovid tells how the suit came before the seizure. Boreas longed for Orithyia and pressed his courtship, but King Tereus and the Thracians long stood between the god and his beloved; and when entreaty won nothing the wind fell back on his own nature, raised his force in fury, and snatched her by violence through the air to Thrace. There she bore the twin boys, born wingless, who grew their eagle's plumage only when golden hair and beard came upon them.5
Hyginus makes Zetes and Calais the sons of the wind Aquilo and of Orithyia, daughter of Erechtheus — winged upon head and feet, their hair sea-blue — and credits them with driving away the three Harpies, Aellopous, Celaeno, and Ocypete.6
The marriage made Boreas a kinsman of Athens, and Pausanias records what the city made of it: when the Persian fleet lay off the coast, Boreas, because of his tie to the Athenians, destroyed most of the foreigners' warships. He notes too that her daughter Chione bore Eumolpus to Poseidon, and that on the chest of Cypselus at Olympia Boreas, serpent-tailed in place of feet, was figured in the very act of carrying Orithyia off.7
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
