Ask who carries the gods' messages in Greek myth and most people will say Hermes. Open the Iliad and it is Iris, almost every time.
She goes to Troy disguised as Priam's son to summon the assembly in Book 2; she fetches Helen to the walls; she brings Achilles to the trench to shout; she carries Zeus' orders to Poseidon in Book 15 and gets the memorable reply that he is nobody's subordinate, which she defuses with a diplomatic reminder about the Erinyes and elder brothers. She guides Priam through the night to Achilles' tent — with Hermes taking over as escort. She summons the winds to light Patroclus' pyre and stays for the feast. She is the working messenger of the poem.
In the Odyssey she does not appear at all, and Hermes has the job. That difference between the two poems is one of the small, hard pieces of evidence in the long argument about how the Homeric epics relate to each other, and it is a clean example of a pantheon reorganising itself in literature rather than in cult.
The rainbow, and the water of the Styx
Her name is the Greek word for the rainbow, and the connection is direct: she is a bridge between sky and earth that appears when it is needed and is gone afterwards. Homer calls her podas okea, swift-footed, and chrysopteros, golden-winged, and describes her descending like a snowflake or a hailstone falling from a cloud in the cold blast of the north wind.
Hesiod gives her a second and more specialised function that has no parallel anywhere else in the pantheon. When one of the gods lies, Zeus sends Iris to fetch the water of the Styx in a golden jug, and the god must pour it in a libation and swear by it; a god who swears falsely lies breathless for a year, then is cut off from the councils and feasts of the other gods for nine more. She is the bailiff of the divine oath. That job connects her to Nike, whose mother Styx is, and it makes her considerably more important than "messenger" suggests.
Her parents are Thaumas — whose name means wonder — and the Oceanid Electra, which makes her a granddaughter of Pontus and Gaia, and a sister of the Harpies, the snatching storm-winds. A rainbow and a squall as sisters is meteorologically apt.
Where she turns up
She has essentially no myths of her own, which is the standard condition of a messenger. But she has good scenes:
- In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, when Leto is in labour on Delos and Eileithyia is being kept away on Olympus by Hera, it is Iris who is sent to fetch her, bribing her with a nine-cubit necklace of gold and amber, and doing it without letting Hera notice.
- In Euripides' Heracles she appears with Lyssa, the spirit of madness, and orders her to drive the hero insane — an unusually brutal errand for her.
- In the Aeneid, Juno sends her to cut a lock of Dido's hair to release her soul from her body, since she was dying neither of natural causes nor by fate. Virgil's line has her trailing a thousand shifting colours across the sky.
- Also in Virgil, she incites the Trojan women to burn the ships in Sicily, disguised as an old woman.
- Aristophanes brings her on stage in the Birds to be interrogated and bullied by Peisetaerus, who wants to know what she thinks she is doing flying through his new airspace without a permit — a joke that only works because everyone in the audience knew exactly what her job was.
Cult, and the offering of figs
Very little, and one memorable detail. Pausanias reports an altar; the fullest account is a note that on Delos she received offerings of wheat cakes made with honey and dried figs — a modest, sweet, non-blood offering suited to a minor and unthreatening power. Otherwise she is a poetic and artistic figure rather than a cultic one, which is worth stating plainly rather than inventing a worship history for her.
In art she is the winged woman with a kerykeion — a herald's staff, the same object Hermes carries — and often a pitcher, sometimes pouring for Dionysus, which is her recurring role on Attic vases.
The eye, the flower and the element
Her linguistic descendants are unusually varied.
- The iris of the eye, named by Greek physicians for the coloured ring, is her.
- The iris flower, whose petals come in almost every colour, is named for the rainbow and by extension for her. Ancient sources associate the flower with funerary use, and iris rhizome — orris root — has been a perfumery fixative since antiquity.
- Iridescence and iridium, the element isolated in 1803 and named for the many-coloured salts it forms.
- Iridology, which is not a science.
Very few Greek deities are present in the anatomy of the eye, a garden border and the periodic table simultaneously.
Modern presence
She is a rare case of a figure whose modern life runs almost entirely through her name rather than her stories. Iris has been a common English given name since the nineteenth century, and it is one of the Greek names that became ordinary without carrying any narrative baggage — most people who use it are thinking of the flower or the eye, both of which lead back to her anyway.
In fiction she appears occasionally as a messenger — the Percy Jackson series makes "Iris-messaging" a rainbow-based communication system, which is a genuinely good extrapolation from Homer — and otherwise chiefly as a name in comics, software and satellites. The rainbow itself has been so thoroughly reassigned to other symbolism over the last half-century that its Greek personification is almost invisible behind it.
Rank, rivals, and rainbow siblings
Is she a goddess or a nymph?
She is called a goddess and is of the older, pre-Olympian sea-and-sky descent rather than an Olympian herself. That is a common category: divine, honoured, with a defined function, without a seat at the twelve. Her position illustrates how much of Greek religion sits outside the canonical list.
Did she and Hermes ever both appear?
Yes, and they divide the work. In Iliad 24, Iris carries the instructions to Priam and to Thetis, and Hermes physically escorts the old king through the Greek camp. That division — Iris announces, Hermes conducts — holds fairly well across the poem, and it fits Hermes' other role as the guide of souls. The later absorption of the messenger function into Hermes alone tidied away a real distinction.
Is she connected to Arke?
In a late tradition, yes: Arke is named as her sister, a second rainbow, who took the Titans' side in the war and had her wings torn off by Zeus and given to Peleus and Thetis as a wedding present — which is how Achilles came to have swift feet, in that account. The story is preserved in a scholiast and in Ptolemy Hephaestion, a source with a reputation for invention, so it should be treated as a curiosity rather than as mainstream tradition.
What is her relationship to the Harpies?
Sisters, in Hesiod: Iris and the Harpies Aello and Ocypete are all children of Thaumas and Electra. In the Argonautica, when the winged sons of Boreas are pursuing the Harpies to save the blind seer Phineus, it is Iris who intervenes and stops them, swearing by the Styx that the Harpies will trouble him no more. The one time she appears in a rescue, it is on behalf of her own family.