Boreas

The ancient Greek personification of the North Wind (perhaps more accurately, the North East Wind).

Boreas is one of the sons of Eos (Dawn) and Astraios; his brothers are: Zephyros (West Wind) and Notos (South Wind); the Athenians believed that Boreas married Oreithyia, the daughter of king Erekhtheus (Erechtheus); when the Persians invaded Greece in 480 BCE, the Athenians, in accordance with a prophecy they had been given, sacrificed to Boreas and Oreithyia so that the god and his wife would intervene and send a storm to stop the Persian navy; a supernatural storm assailed the Persians off the coast of Sepias and four hundred ships were lost; as thanks for his help, the Athenians built a shrine to Boreas on the river Ilissus.

There are two types of winds: 1) the divinely created winds, i.e. Boreas (North Wind), Notos (South Wind), Zephyros (West Wind) and the Etesian winds, and 2) the ill-favored winds that were created by the monster, Typhoeus, when Zeus imprisoned him under the earth; the divinely created winds nourish and bless the earth but the winds of Typhoeus are wild and destructive.

• Theogony, lines 379+ and 869-880
• Histories, book 7, chapter 189