The four winds were the children of Eos the Dawn and Astraeus the starry Titan, and they were given dominion each over one quarter of the world. Boreas was the cold blast from the north, who came over the Thracian mountains in winter; Notus was the wet south wind that brought the storms of autumn; Eurus was the unlucky east wind that troubled mariners; and Zephyrus was the gentle west, the breath of spring, who melts the snow and unbinds the earth.

Of the four, Boreas had the fullest mythology. He dwelt in a cave on Mount Haemus in Thrace, and he was said to have carried off the Athenian princess Oreithyia from the banks of the Ilissus, and to have made her his wife; from this union were born the winged twins Calais and Zetes, who afterward sailed with the Argonauts and freed Phineus from the Harpies. The Athenians, remembering this kinship, prayed to Boreas before the battle of Salamis when the Persian fleet lay off the coast; and the great storm that wrecked the Persians at Cape Sepias was credited to him.

Zephyrus was the lover of the youth Hyacinthus, and afterward of the goddess Iris, by whom he became the father of Eros (in some accounts) or of Pothos. The Romans called him Favonius, the Favorable. Notus was depicted as a man pouring water from an inverted urn, the very emblem of the rain-storm. Eurus was less worshipped than the others, for the east wind brought ill weather to most of Greece, but at sea his power was much feared.

In addition to these four greater winds, the lesser winds were many — there were the harsh north-east Caecias, the south-west Lips, the south-east Apheliotes — and the Tower of the Winds at Athens, built in the first century before our era by Andronicus of Cyrrhus, depicts eight winds, each named and each blowing from his proper quarter. But the four cardinal winds remained the great Anemoi, and to them sailors prayed, and farmers, and all whose work was bound to the seasons.