Deucalion and the Flood

Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha are the two people who outlive the great flood in Greek myth. Zeus drowns the world, and the couple float to Mount Parnassus. They then remake humanity by throwing stones over their shoulders. The two main tellings give different reasons for the flood and for their survival.

Apollodorus, in his Library, says Zeus meant to destroy the men of the Bronze Age. Deucalion is the son of Prometheus and reigns near Phthia. His wife Pyrrha is the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. Apollodorus gives no crime that provoked the flood.

Ovid supplies one. In the Metamorphoses, Jupiter visits the house of Lycaon in Arcadia. Lycaon tests the god's divinity and serves him the flesh of a hostage, and Jupiter turns him into a wolf. The god then tells the divine council that all humankind has grown as wicked, and that he will destroy it.

In Apollodorus the rescue is a matter of foresight. On the advice of Prometheus, Deucalion builds a chest and stocks it with provisions. He and Pyrrha climb in. Zeus then sends heavy rain from heaven, floods most of Greece and kills nearly everyone. A few people escape to the high mountains nearby. The mountains of Thessaly split apart, and the world beyond the Isthmus and the Peloponnese is overwhelmed.

In Ovid the flood has more machinery. Jupiter first thinks of lightning, but fears the fire will ignite the heavens. He shuts the North Wind away and sends the South Wind out, dripping. Then he calls on his brother. At Neptune's word the rivers pour over their banks, and Poseidon in his Roman form strikes the earth with his trident so that her water sources burst open. Land and sea merge into one sea without a shore. Ovid fills the drowned world with details: a man rowing above his own grain, seals lying where goats grazed, dolphins tangled in oak branches.

Deucalion's craft floats over the sea for nine days and nights in Apollodorus, and it drifts to Parnassus. When the rain stops he lands and sacrifices to Zeus, the god of Escape. Zeus sends Hermes and lets Deucalion choose anything he wants. Deucalion asks for people.

Ovid has no chest. His Deucalion and Pyrrha arrive on Parnassus in a small, fragile boat, when only the twin peaks rise above the water. Ovid says they had come to worship the Corycian Nymphs, the mountain deities, and Themis, who in that age gave oracles. He adds that no man was better or more just than Deucalion, and no woman more devout than Pyrrha. Jupiter sees the last two innocent people and clears the sky.

When the sea retreats, Ovid's Deucalion weeps. He calls Pyrrha his sister and his wife, and wishes he could make people again by his father's art. The couple go to the temple of Themis, covered in moss and with its altar fires cold, and ask how the human race can be restored. Her answer is one of the most famous oracles in Greek and Roman myth.

Pyrrha refuses, afraid to insult her mother's bones. Deucalion works out the riddle. Their mother is the Earth, and the stones of the earth are her bones. They veil their heads, loosen their clothes and throw stones behind them. Ovid says it would be beyond belief, if the ages were not a witness. The stones soften and take on rough human form, like unfinished marble statues. The moist parts become flesh and the hard parts bone. The stones Deucalion throws become men, and the stones Pyrrha throws become women.

Apollodorus makes the stones a gift from Zeus, brought by Hermes. He derives the Greek word for people, laos, from laas, a stone. Pindar plays on the same pun in his ninth Olympian Ode. There Pyrrha and Deucalion come down from Parnassus by the ordinance of Zeus and found a unified race of stone offspring without a marriage-bed, and the stones give the people their name.

Apollodorus then lists the couple's children: first Hellen, then Amphictyon, then a daughter, Protogenia. He adds that some say Hellen's father was Zeus.