IN the first century BC, the inhabitants of the Greek city of Athens decided to improve the free availability of weather information. They commissioned what might be called the world's first weather station, the Horologion of Andronicus of Kyrrhos, more popularly known as the "Tower of the Winds".
The structure is octagonal, 26 feet in diameter, 42 feet high and made of marble, and its eight faces, directed towards the eight points of the Athenian compass, are embellished with sculpted figures representing a mythical personification of the prevailing winds of ancient Greece.
The cold and fierce northerly, for instance, is represented by Boreas, a bearded old man, warmly clothed and holding a conch shell near his mouth, intended to suggest the noise made by the howling north wind.
The north-east wind, Kaikias, is also represented by an old man, this time holding a shield, rather like a dustbin lid, half full of hailstones, as if he were ready to rattle them down on the surrounding countryside. The other winds are also represented on the appropriate faces - Apeliotes, the showery east wind, Zephros, the gentle westerly, and Auster, the south wind.
This last, the wind called Auster, was represented by a sticky, slimy person who was provided with all the hall-marks of the excessive moisture he acquired on his passage across the Mediterranean. He flew along wrapped up in clouds, carrying a water jar which had just been emptied, and is 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 roof of the Andronicus's Tower was originally surmounted by a bronze weather vane in the form of a Triton holding a rod and turning freely on a pivot. The citizen of Athens, by noting the position of the wind vane relative to the sculpted figures, could thus avail themselves of a simple short-term weather forecast.
The Tower of the Winds lies clone to the Acropolis, and in ancient times looked out over the Athenian market place. Today its situation is less imposing: it stands among modern housing, and has lost its wind vane, and also the water clock and sundials with which once it was adorned.
But the structure itself with the carved figures of the Grecian winds still survives after 2,000 years, a fitting monument to the weathermen of ancient Greece.
