Boreas
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Boreas. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
The name of the north wind blowing from the Hyperborean mountains. According to the poets, he was son of Astraeus and Aurora . Boreas is said by Homer to have turned himself into a horse out of love for the muses of Ericthonius. (Il. xx. 223.) Bosporus (Oxford). The name of any straits among the Greeks, but especially applied to the Thracian Bosporus (Channel of Constantinople), which unites the Propontis or Sea of Marmora with the Euxine or Black Sea ; and the Cimmerian Bosporus (Straits. of Kaffa), which unites the Palus Maeotis or Sea of Azof with the Euxine or Black Sea.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a bellowing wind; the northern wind; a cold northerly wind. In mythology, the son of Astræus and Eos, usually worshipped as the god of the north wind. The assiduity with which the worship of Boreas was cultivated at Athens proceeded from gratitude, the north wind having on one occasion destroyed the fleet of the Persians when meditating the invasion of Attica. A similar cause induced the inhabitants of Megalopolis to consider Boreas as their peculiar divinity, in whose honor they instituted an annual festival. Boreas was usually represented with wings dripping with golden dewdrops, and the train of his garment sweeping along the ground.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the north wind. Boreas was reputed to dwell in Thrace from whence his winds reached Greece. A temple was erected in his honor at Athens to commemorate his destruction of the fleet of Xerxes. In art he was represented with wings. His hair and beard were full of flakes of snow. As he flew along, his trailing garments stirred up clouds of dust. See Wind
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Nothing has overturned these accounts: Boreas is still the son of Astraeus and Eos, still the Thracian north wind whom the Athenians thanked for wrecking Xerxes' ships in 480 BC, and still winged and shaggy in art — most famously on the octagonal Tower of the Winds in Athens, which visitors can see today. One small correction is worth making: where 1000 Classical Characters (1900) says Boreas "turned himself into a horse out of love for the muses of Ericthonius," Homer's line (Iliad xx) is about the mares of Erichthonius, on which the wind-god sired twelve swift foals — a printer's slip rather than a lost tradition. What has changed is the register in which the name survives: not cult but vocabulary, in "boreal" forests, the "hyperborean" far north, the aurora borealis, and the Bora that still blasts down the Adriatic coast each winter. As mythology, the entries read as well now as they did then.
Written for this edition, 2026.