Boreas
deity figure · 9 works · 11 mentions · 18 anchored passages
Thracian Boreas · king of the winds · the cold blasts of Boreas · the north wind
in the texts
Iliad
North wind god invoked both as Hera's past accomplice against Herakles and as a simile for wind and storm.
yet even this did not relieve my mind from the incessant anxiety which I felt about noble Herakles whom you and Boreas had spitefully conveyed beyond the seas [ pontos] to Cos, after suborning the tempests;
Iris, fleet as the wind, obeyed him, and as the cold hail or snowflakes that fly from out the clouds before the blast of Boreas, even so did she wing her way till she came close up to the great shaker of the earth.
Boreas was enamored of them as they were feeding, and covered them in the semblance of a dark-maned stallion.
Orations
The north wind personified as a god, said by Homer to have fathered horses upon Trojan mares.
Whence indeed Homer too, it seems to me, thinking it not impossible nor incredible to men that there should be a wind-born race of horses, said that Boreas, having fallen in love with certain Trojan mares, filled them with seed and that a race of horses was born from them.
The Histories
Wind-god invoked by the Athenians, credited by them with destroying part of the Persian fleet in the storm.
When they went home, they founded a sacred precinct of Boreas beside the Ilissus river.
The story is told that because of an oracle the Athenians invoked Boreas, the north wind, to help them, since another oracle told them to summon their son-in-law as an ally.
They were stationed off Chalcis in Euboea, and when they saw the storm rising, they then, if they had not already, sacrificed to and called upon Boreas and Orithyia to help them by destroying the barbarian fleet, just as before at Athos.
Theogony
A wind-god, one of the three beneficial winds exempted from Typhoeus's harmful brood.
And from Typhoeus come boisterous winds which blow damply, except Notus and Boreas and clear Zephyr.
Works and Days
The North Wind, personified as a powerful, fur-piercing winter force that afflicts animals and men alike and against which the narrator repeatedly advises precaution.
He blows across horse-breeding Thrace upon the wide sea and stirs it up, while earth and the forest howl.
But through the fleeces of sheep, because their wool is abundant, the keen wind Boreas pierces not at all;
it is drawn from the ever-flowing rivers and is raised high above the earth by windstorm, and sometimes it turns to rain towards evening, and sometimes to wind when Thracian Boreas huddles the thick clouds.
Olympian
North wind god, beyond whose blasts lies the land of the Hyperboreans that Heracles visited.
Pursuing that doe he had also seen that land beyond the cold blasts of Boreas;
Pythian
The god of the north wind, father of Zetes and Calais.
Swiftly came those that dwell around the foothills of Mount Pangaeon, for with a smiling spirit their father Boreas, king of the winds, quickly and willingly equipped Zetes and Calais with purple wings bristling down their backs.
Phaedrus
The north wind god said in local legend to have abducted the princess Oreithyia from the banks of the Ilissus.
and there is an altar of Boreas somewhere thereabouts.
Tell me, Socrates, is it not from some place along here by the Ilissus that Boreas is said to have carried off Oreithyia?
then I might give a rational explanation, that a blast of Boreas, the north wind, pushed her off the neighboring rocks as she was playing with Pharmacea, and that when she had died in this manner she was said to have been carried off by Boreas.
Antigone
The wind god named as father in the genealogy of Phineus's wife.
She was the child of Boreas, running swift as horses over the steep hills, a daughter of gods.