Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [26]
The eight winds, shown flying clockwise around the building, are Boreas, the north, the personification of a strong wind; Skiron, the northwest; Zephyros, the west, carrying a heap of flowers to denote his newfound benignity; Lips, the southwest; Notos, the south, representing the wet winds of winter; Euros, the southeast, shown as a winter gale; Apeliotes, the east, carrying a basket of fruit; and Kaikias, the northeast, a strong wind; he is stocky, bearded, and looks none too friendly.
The tower was very precisely oriented. A thousand years before the compass, Andronicus plotted the directions exactly. Modern engineers wouldn't move the tower a third of a degree.
At about this time, the Romans began to weigh into the debate. Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist who was active a few decades after the start of the Christian era, got the origin of winds more or less right when he wrote in book 1 of his Natural History of the World that "the sun's rays scorch and strike everywhere on earth in the middle of the universe and, broken, bounce back and take with them all they have drunk. Steam falls from on high and again returns on high, empty winds violently swoop down and go back with their plunder . . . the earth pours breath back to the sky as if it were a vacuum." He wasn't very consistent (he asserted in book 2 that winds can just as easily "issue from certain caves in Dalmatia") but then he added, somewhat redeeming his naturalist's credentials, "neither is it impossible, but that they do arise out of waters, breathing and sending out an air, which neither can thicken into a mist, nor gather into clouds: also they may be driven by the lugitation and impulsion of the Sun, because the wind is conceived to be nought else but the fluctuation and waving of the air."
The fluctuation and waving of the air! Precisely. A modern meteorologist could hardly have put it more succinctly.
More winds exist than the four Homer described, Pliny wrote, but "the Age ensuing, added eight more; and they were on the other side in their conceit too subtle and concise. The modern sailors of late days found out a mean between both: and they put unto that short number of the first, four winds and no more, which they took out of the later. Therefore every quarter of the heaven hath [just] two winds apiece," which pretty much restated what the Horologium had been saying for a hundred years already. This assertion came in the middle of a rant against the sad materialism of modern times, in which the naturalist lamented that "men's manners are waxen old and decay; now, all good customs are in the wane: and notwithstanding that the fruit of learning be as great as ever it was, and the recompence as liberal, yet men are become idle in this behalf. The seas are open to all, an infinite multitude of Sailors have discovered all coasts whatsoever, they sail through and arrive familiarly at every shore: all for gain and lucre, but none for knowledge and cunning."5
That's pretty much where it rested for the next thousand years or so. Greek and Roman sailors plied the Mediterranean, Arab sailors the Indian Ocean, Chinese mariners the Yellow Sea, and the Phoenicians ventured out into the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Sailors are practical men, and they learned how winds can become a network of conduits taking them across the seas and back again; they understood that a typical journey might come to use a number of different winds to proceed in different directions—if one chooses carefully, one can always come home. As Sebastian Smith put it in Southern Winds, this was wind hopping, similar to changing buses several times to cross a city.6
Not just directions but also seasons were plotted, and dangerous winds were known to arrive at certain times of the year. Prudent rulers prohibited travel during those seasons to minimize their losses. In early Christian times the Coptic calendar listed