Son of Prometheus and king in the regions about Phthia; forewarned by his father, he rode out Zeus's flood in a chest with his wife Pyrrha and refathered mankind from thrown stones.1
When Zeus would destroy the men of the Bronze Age, Deucalion — son of Prometheus, reigning in the regions about Phthia, husband of Pyrrha — built a chest by the advice of his father, stored it with provisions, and embarked. Zeus poured heavy rain from heaven and flooded the greater part of Greece. Nine days and nine nights Deucalion drifted in the chest, and on Parnassus he came to land, and when the rain ceased he sacrificed there to Zeus Phyxios, the god of Escape.2⚖
Ovid sends the same waters over a guiltier world: after Lycaon's outrage proved mankind wicked, Jupiter resolved in the council of the gods to destroy the race, and sea and sky together unmade the earth. One mountain alone still broke the waves with its twin peaks — Parnassus — and there a little boat carried Deucalion, 'Promethides', and his Pyrrha.3⚖
Hyginus moves the refuge to another mountain entirely — and gives Jove a stranger motive. When Phaethon's fall had set the world ablaze, Jove, wanting a pretext to destroy the whole mortal race, pretended he wished to put out the fire and let loose every river. Deucalion and Pyrrha fled — no chest, no boat — to Mount Etna, said to be the highest mountain in Sicily.4⚖
How empty was the world they inherited? Ovid leaves only the two of them — 'we two are the multitude; the sea holds all the rest' — and Hyginus agrees that the whole human race perished except Deucalion and Pyrrha. But Apollodorus keeps a back door open: all men were destroyed, he writes, except a few who fled to the high mountains in the neighborhood; and Pausanias names some of them, from Megarus who swam to Gerania to the Parnassians who followed howling wolves to the heights.5⚖
In Ovid the new mankind is an oracle's riddle. The two survivors made their way to the shrine of Themis by the waters of the Cephisus and begged the goddess for help; she answered: cast behind you as you go the bones of your great mother. It was Deucalion who understood — the great mother is the Earth, her bones the stones — and the stones they threw began to soften, grow, and take human form: those from his hands men, those from Pyrrha's women.6⚖
The mythographers tell the stone-birth without Themis. In Apollodorus, Zeus himself sent Hermes to Deucalion and allowed him to choose what he would; he chose to get people, and at the bidding of Zeus threw stones over his head — the stones Deucalion threw became men, those Pyrrha threw became women. That, Apollodorus adds, is why people are called laoi, from laas, a stone. In Hyginus there is no messenger at all: unable to bear living alone in the emptied world, the pair begged Jove either to give them people or to destroy them too, and Jove ordered them to cast stones behind their backs.7⚖
Apollonius remembers him not for the flood but for what came after. When Jason tells Medea of his homeland in Colchis, he begins with him: Prometheus son of Iapetus begat goodly Deucalion, who first founded cities and reared temples to the immortal gods, and first ruled over men — the first king, in the Argonautica's telling, of the land men call Haemonia, which is Thessaly.8
Athens kept its own relics of him. Pausanias saw, within the precinct of Olympian Zeus, the cleft in the earth a cubit wide where they say the water ran away after Deucalion's flood — every year wheat meal kneaded with honey is thrown into it — and beside it the ancient sanctuary the Athenians say Deucalion built, citing a grave not far from the present temple as evidence that he lived at Athens.9
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story