Ζέφυρος

Zephyros was the Greek god of the west wind, one of the four Anemoi (wind gods) who governed the cardinal directions: Boreas (north), Notos (south), Euros (east), and Zephyros (west). The west wind had a particular significance in Greek geography and mythology. For Greek sailors in the Aegean, the west wind brought the sailing season: Hesiod in Works and Days instructs farmers to harvest when Zephyros stirs the waters, and to sail fifty days after the summer solstice when Zephyros blows. He was associated with spring, with flowers, with the gentle warming that follows winter. The name's etymology likely derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *dʰubʰ- (dark, dusky) or from a root related to west and dusk, the direction from which the wind came.

Zephyros had a mythology as eventful as any of the Olympians. He loved the beautiful Spartan youth Hyakinthos, but so did Apollo. When Apollo was teaching Hyakinthos to throw the discus, the jealous Zephyros blew Apollo's throw off course so that the discus struck Hyakinthos and killed him. From Hyakinthos's blood sprang the hyacinth flower, marked with the letters AI (the Greek exclamation of grief). Zephyros was also credited with fathering the two horses of Achilles — Xanthos and Balios, horses of divine swiftness — with the Harpy Podarge. The gentle wind god's mythology, it turns out, included murder and divine breeding.

The Latin Zephyrus preserved the Greek name and meaning, and medieval European literature used the west wind as a conventional symbol of spring and renewal. Chaucer opens The Canterbury Tales with an invocation of 'the Zephyr' who breathes life into the spring landscape — 'And the yonge sonne / Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, / And smale foweles maken melodye... / Inspired hath in every holt and heeth / The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne.' The personification carried through the Renaissance, when the west wind in Botticelli's Primavera is usually identified as Zephyros.

The common noun zephyr entered English in the 14th century, initially meaning specifically the west wind, then broadening through the 16th and 17th centuries to mean any soft, gentle breeze. The god's name became a common noun with almost complete semantic bleaching: a zephyr today is simply a light wind, with no directional or divine specificity whatsoever. The most specific of the wind gods — with his Aegean associations, his spring mythology, his murderous jealousy — became the least specific of all English wind words. Because his wind was the gentlest, his name endured as the adjective for gentleness itself.