The ancient Greeks liked to personify the winds - to imagine them as named persons, usually male, and to endow each of them with those characteristics brought to mind by the breezes blowing from the various quarters of their world.
Notos, for example, was the wind from the south, and was a sticky, slimy person. When portrayed in a picture or a sculpture he was provided with all the hallmarks of the excessive moisture he acquired on his passage to Greece across the Mediterranean.
He was shown flying along wrapped in clouds, carrying a water jar which had just been emptied, and his personal appearance was described, graphically but distastefully, by Ovid in his Metamorphoses:
His beard hung full of hideous storms;
He was dankish, dark and black,
With water streaming down the hair
That lay upon his back;
His ugly forehead wrinkled was,
With foggy mists full thick,
And on his shoulders and his breast
A stilling dew did stick.
The cold and fierce northerly wind was represented by Boreas, a bearded old man, warmly clothed and holding a conch near his mouth, intended to suggest the noise his howling made. The north-east wind, Kaikias, was also represented by an old man, this time holding a shield, rather like a dustbin lid, half-full of hailstones, as if he was ready to rattle them down on the surrounding countryside. The other winds were also appropriately personified - like Apeliotes, the showery east wind, and Zephros, the gentle westerly.
In the first century BC, the inhabitants of Athens commissioned Andronicus of Kyrrhos to build a structure to depict these eight important persons. The result was the Tower of the Winds, an octagonal structure 26 feet in diameter, 42 feet high and made of marble.
It had eight faces, each embellished with a sculpted figure representing one of these mythical personifications.
The roof of Andronicus' Tower was originally surmounted by a bronze weathervane in the form of Triton holding a rod and turning freely on a pivot. The citizens of Athens, therefore, by noting the position of the wind-vane relative to the sculpted figures, could avail themselves of a simple short-term weather forecast.
The tower lies close to the Acropolis, and in ancient times looked out over the Athenian market place. It is still there, but today it is less imposing; it stands among modern housing and has lost its wind vane, but the structure itself with the carved figures of the Grecian winds still survives after more than two millenniums, a fitting monument to the meteorology of ancient Greece.