Ogyges or Ogygus (Ancient Greek: Ὠγύγης / Ὤγυγος) is a primeval mythological ruler of ancient Greece, generally of Boeotia and the aboriginal Ectenes at Thebes, though an alternate tradition makes him first king of Attica. The Ogygian deluge — sometimes a local inundation of Lake Copais, sometimes a wider flood — is named from his reign and was remembered as earlier than Deucalion's.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Ogyges" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Family and reign
Genealogies disagree widely: Ogyges may be autochthonous, son of Poseidon and Alistra, of Boeotus, or even of Cadmus; one notice calls an Ogygias son of Zeus and Eurynome. He is husband of Thebe, from whom Thebes is sometimes said to take its name, and father variously of Eleusis (or Eleusinus), Cadmus, and daughters Aulis, Alalcomenia, and Thelxinia.
Pausanias reports that the first to occupy the land of Thebes were the Ectenes, whose king was Ogygus the aboriginal; from him poets call Thebes Ogygian. Africanus and others also credit him with founding Eleusis. Poets later called Thebans Ogygidae.
II.The Ogygian deluge
During his reign Greece remembered a great flood named after him. Some sources treat it as local — the rising of Lake Copais in Boeotia — others as an Attic inundation in the time of Phoroneus of Argos. When taken as global it invited comparison with Noah's flood; after Ogyges's death Attica was said to have gone kingless for 189 years until Cecrops.
The later deluge of Deucalion and Pyrrha is often read as another telling of the same catastrophe. Apollodorus's systematic handbook moves straight to Deucalion and does not narrate an Ogygian flood, so the double-flood tradition is itself a matter of divergent local memory.