Boreas was the god of the north wind — the cold, violent breath of winter, mightiest and most feared of the four Anemoi (the wind-gods). When the icy gale roared down out of Thrace and froze the Greek world, it was Boreas who blew; and unlike his gentler brothers, he was a god of raw, abducting force, as ready to seize a bride as to wreck a fleet.
The North Wind
A son of the dawn-goddess Eos and the star-god Astraeus, Boreas was the personification of the north wind and the bringer of cold winter air. He was imagined as a strong, winged, bearded man, often shown with his cheeks puffed and his garment billowing, blowing through a conch shell. His home was in Thrace, the cold land to the north of Greece, from which the freezing winter wind seemed to come. Of the four chief winds — Boreas (north), Notus (south), Zephyrus (west) and Eurus (east) — he was the strongest and the most dangerous.
The Abduction of Oreithyia
Boreas loved Oreithyia, a princess of Athens, but his rough wooing was rebuffed. Impatient with courtship — for the north wind knew only force — he swept down, wrapped her in a cloud, and carried her off to Thrace to be his bride. By her he fathered the Boreads, the winged heroes Zetes and Calais who later sailed with the Argonauts, and two daughters. Through this marriage the Athenians came to count Boreas as a kinsman by marriage — a tie they would one day call upon.
Defender of Athens
When the vast fleet of the Persian king Xerxes threatened Greece, the Athenians prayed to their stormy in-law Boreas for help. The north wind answered: a great gale shattered hundreds of Persian ships against the rocks. In gratitude the Athenians built him a shrine on the river Ilissus — one of the few times a Greek city honoured a wind as its saviour. The same violence that made Boreas feared made him, that day, a deliverer.
The Breath of Winter
Boreas endures as the very image of the north wind and of winter's cold fury — his name surviving in “boreal” and the aurora borealis. He embodies the Greek sense of the winds as living, willful powers, and of the north wind in particular as a force of raw, irresistible strength: a god who courted by abduction and saved a nation by shipwreck.
The other winds whispered or warmed; Boreas seized — whether a bride or a fleet, the north wind took what it wished.