Aeolus, ancestor of Sisyphus in Greek mythology

Aeolus, son of Hellen, is the eponymous ancestor of the Aeolian Greeks and the father of Sisyphus. He is not the keeper of the winds who hosts Odysseus — a confusion so persistent that it is worth settling before anything else.

A genealogy that is really a map

Hellen, from whom the Hellenes take their name, has three sons: Dorus, Xuthus and Aeolus. Xuthus in turn fathers Ion and Achaeus. Set out plainly, the family tree reads: Dorians, Aeolians, Ionians and Achaeans, descended from a single ancestor in a single generation.

This is not a family in any ordinary sense. It is a claim, made in genealogical form, that the four main Greek dialect groups are branches of one people — and a ranking, since Ion and Achaeus are grandsons while Dorus and Aeolus are sons. Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women, where much of this is preserved, works throughout by this method: political and ethnic relationships expressed as descent, so that alliances become cousinhoods and rivalries become disputed inheritances.

Aeolus takes Thessaly and marries Enarete. Their children scatter across mainland Greece as founders, which is the same operation performed at a smaller scale: every city that claimed an Aeolid founder was claiming a place in that map.

The most disreputable family in Greece

The Aeolids are a remarkable concentration of transgressors, and the pattern is too consistent to be accidental.

Sisyphus cheats death twice and is set to roll his stone forever. Salmoneus drives a bronze chariot trailing cauldrons and throws torches, claiming to be Zeus, and is destroyed by the real thunderbolt. Athamas is driven mad and kills his own son. Alcyone and her husband Ceyx call each other Zeus and Hera and are turned into birds for it.

Three of these are punishments for impersonating or defying the gods. Whatever the Aeolid catalogue was originally for, it accumulated the stories Greek myth used to define the boundary a mortal must not cross — which makes Aeolus the ancestor of Greek hybris in a fairly literal sense.

Three men of the same name

The Aeolus of the Odyssey is a different figure: son of Hippotas, living on a floating island ringed with bronze, who gives Odysseus the winds tied in an oxhide bag which the crew opens within sight of Ithaca. Homer never connects him to Hellen.

A third Aeolus, son of Poseidon and Arne or Melanippe, appears in western Greek and southern Italian genealogies.

Later mythographers, uncomfortable with three men of one name, spliced them — making the wind-keeper a descendant of the Thessalian king, or simply merging the pair outright. This page keeps them apart, because the sources that matter do. The confusion is a useful illustration of a general problem: Greek naming was repetitive, mythographers disliked loose ends, and a good deal of “genealogy” in later handbooks is tidying-up after the fact rather than tradition.