θύελλα

θύελλα (thuella, "THOO-el-lah") enters this corpus thirty-six times, spread across sixteen works, and the record concentrates it hard at one end. The Odyssey holds it fourteen times and the Iliad six, so twenty of its thirty-six lives belong to Homeric epic. After that the count collapses: two apiece in the Theogony and in the Septuagint's Deuteronomium ("second law," the fifth book of the Greek Old Testament), then a single occurrence in each of twelve further works — Agamemnon, Antigone, Bacchae ("bacchant women"), De Mundo ("on the cosmos"), Electra, Exodus ("the going-out"), Hebrews, Heracles, Oedipus at Colonus, Shield of Heracles, Suppliants, and Works and Days. This is a word carried down from epic into the tragedians, the philosophers, and scripture — everywhere at the edges, at home only in Homer.

The lexica agree on the sense. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940), marking it feminine (ἡ, "hē," "the"), glosses "hurricane, squall" and quotes the Homeric surfaces: κακὴ ἀνέμοιο θύελλα ("an evil blast of wind," Iliad 6.346), the storm μισγομένων ἀνέμων ("of winds mingling," Odyssey 5.317), and πυρός τ᾽ ὀλοοῖο θύελλαι ("storms of destroying fire," Odyssey 12.68) — the word names not only water and air but fire on the move. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses it "thunderstorm, hurricane."

The etymology is recorded, and Beekes (Brill 2010) carries it: in his view θύελλα is built from θύω ("thuō," "to storm, rage, dash"), perhaps modeled on ἄελλα ("aella," "whirlwind, gale"). The same entry preserves the family Greek grew from it — the adjective θυελλώδης ("stormy") and the poetic compound θυελλόπους ("storm-footed"), formed after ἀελλόπους ("wind-footed").

The concordance carries the word past Homer as a plural of tragic weather: θύελλαι ("storm-winds") at Agamemnon 819, θυέλλαισιν ("in storm-winds") in the Antigone and the Bacchae.

If the same word names the sea-blast, the fire, and the wind of a god's arrival, is θύελλα a thing of weather, or of the divine coming near?