AEOLUS

In Homer a son of Hippotes, and a favourite of the gods, whom Zeus has appointed keeper of the winds. On his Aeolian island, floating in the far west, its steep cliff encircled by a brazen wall, he lives in unbroken bliss with his wife and his six sons and six daughters, whom he has wedded to one another. He hospitably entertains Odysseus, gives him the unfavourable winds shut up in a leathern bag, and a kindly breeze to waft him on his voyage. But when the hero's comrades open the bag, the winds break out and blow him back to the Aeolian Isle; then Aeolus drives him from his door as one hateful to the gods. In the later legend he dwells on one of the Aeolian isles to the north of Sicily, Lipara, or Strongyle, where, throned on a mountain, he holds the winds imprisoned in the hollow of the same; yet he does not seem to have received real worship. He was, moreover, brought into genealogical connection with Aeolus of Thessaly, whose son Mimas begets Hippotes, and he (by Melanippe) a second Aeolus, king of Aeolis in Aetolia; this Aeolus gives his daughter Arne, the beloved of Poseidon, to a guest-friend from Metapontum in Lucania, where she has two sons by the god, the third Aeolus and Boeotus. These, adopted by the Metapontian, kill his wife Antolyte and run away, Boeotus returning with Arne to his grandfather, and Aeolus settling in the isles named after him, and founding the city of Lipara.