Harpies and Boreads, tornadoes and aerial whirlwinds: The Strophades Islands and the myth of Phineus in the Greek tradition

The Strophades are one of those places that enter into the imagination of a culture and shape its vision of the world. These islands entered the Greek cosmographical world as an etiological myth resulting from the transposition of a myth of divine punishment (Phineus) into a mythical conflict between two related, yet opposite cosmic powers (Boreads vs. Harpies). The whirling winds, the swirling/spinning movements and patterns associated with tornadoes and other turbulent atmospheric phenomena play a prominent role in the foundation narrative of the Strophades, 'Islands of Turning' where the Boreads turned around. The careful analysis of these motifs will allow to better understand how, in the context of the Alexandrian poetry's efforts to cast a new perspective on the world and to redefine its contours, a myth of aerial pursuit turns into an aition and into a nesiotic foundation myth with a cosmological dimension.