Tower Of The Winds
Weather vanes were known in classical antiquity, though, strange to say, no Greek or Latin name for them has come down to us from that period. The earliest of which we have any record must have had a good many predecessors, as its elaborate construction implies a preliminary process of evolution. It was made of brass, in the shape of a Triton, and stood at the top of a little octagonal building at Athens, erected about a century and a half before the Christian era and called in later times the Tower of the Winds.
Weather vanes were known in classical antiquity,
though, strange to say, no Greek or Latin name for them has come down to us from that period. The earliest of which we have any record must have had a good many predecessors, as its elaborate construction implies a preliminary process of evolution. It was made of brass, in the shape of a Triton, and stood at the top of a little octagonal building at Athens, erected about a century and a half before the Christian era and called in later times the Tower of the Winds. The building is still in a good state of preservation, but the vane has long since vanished. The Triton held a wand, which always pointed to the wind and likewise to one or another of eight bas-reliefs carved on the faces of the tower.
Each of these figures was symbolical of one of the eight winds recognized by the Athenians. If the wind was in the north the Triton turned his wand to the figure of Boreas, a crabbed-looking old man in a heavy cloak; if south, to Notos, a youth bearing a water-vessel (to signify that this wind brought rain); if west, to graceful Zephyr, dropping spring flowers from the folds of his garments; and so on. The figures are familiar today through frequent representation in books and they furnish an interesting illustration of the fact that even in ancient times particular types of weather were associated in people's minds with the different wind directions.
The learned Roman M. Terentius Varro had on his farm a vane embodying the modern feature of an indoor dial, and this idea was revived toward the end of the sixteenth century of our era by another erudite Italian, Egnatio Danti, who erected several vanes of this sort in Bologna and Florence, some fitted with horizontal dials on the ceilings, others with vertical dials on the walls. Danti published a book in 1578 in which such vanes are described and illustrated.
The weathercock, in the literal sense of the term, dates back at least to the ninth century, for in the year 1652 it was recorded that a vane of this shape at Brixen, in the Tyrol, bore an inscription stating that it had been erected by Bishop Rampertus in the year 820. Brewer, in his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, tells us that a Papal decree of the ninth century required that every church steeple should be adorned with one of these birds, as the emblem of St. Peter, but this statement appears to be unfounded.
The origin of the weathercock is, in fact, still obscure, though there has been no lack of speculation on the subject. One thing is certain; this particular form of vane was used widely, and almost exclusively, on ecclesiastical buildings for hundreds of years, and therefore must have had some special religious significance.
