The bag of winds
Aeolus entertains Odysseus for a month and listens to his story. When he leaves, the god gives him a leather bag containing the other winds, tied with a silver cord, and leaves the west wind free to carry him home. Odysseus sails for nine days within sight of Ithaca, but his crew, thinking the bag contains treasure, opens it while he sleeps, and the ship is driven back to Aeolia.
The episode is one of the Odyssey’s cruellest near misses. The return is within reach, and it is lost through the crew’s greed and Odysseus’s failure to tell them what the bag contains.
The refusal
When Odysseus returns to Aeolia and asks for help again, Aeolus refuses. He says that a man hated by the gods cannot be escorted home, and he drives him away. The refusal marks a turning point: from this point on, Odysseus’s journey is no longer a matter of favourable winds and divine gifts but of endurance, cunning, and loss.
Aeolus is a minor figure, but his island is one of the poem’s clearest images of a help that is withdrawn once it has been misused.
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The following entries mention “Aeolus”.