Two brothers are born already able to fly. In Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), the North Wind Boreas carries off the Athenian princess Orithyia as she plays by a river: "While Orithyia was playing by the Ilissus river, / Boreas carried her off and had intercourse with her". From that union come two daughters, Cleopatra and Chione, and "winged sons, Zetes and Calais" — the Boreads, wind-children who join the Argonauts and are said elsewhere to have chased the Harpies.

Where on the body the wings sit is the very point this address files, and here the primary narrative only calls the brothers winged; the anatomy is fixed by the editor. In a note, Frazer gathers the variant traditions: according to one account "their wings / were attached to their feet, and their hair was sky-blue", while another authority "describes them with wings on their / heads as well as on their feet". It is Frazer's note, not Apollodorus's own voice, that hangs the plumage on foot and head — feet for the runner's swiftness, head as a further crown of the wind — matching the motif's own parenthesis, a person with wings on feet or head.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index assigns this number, cites only this Greek witness, and it reaches served text solely through Frazer's marginal gathering; the mythographer's bare line about "winged sons" is all the narrative itself will grant. When a hero is drawn with wings at his feet, is the image asking us to see speed, or ascent?