Daughter of Deucalion and, by Zeus, the mother of Aethlius — the thread by which the Elean royal line is tied back to the survivors of the flood.1
When the waters fell and the stones cast by Pyrrha had stood up as women, Deucalion had children by her. Apollodorus counts them in order: first Hellen, whose father some say was Zeus; second Amphictyon, who reigned over Attica after Cranaus; and third a daughter, Protogeneia. She is the female issue of the renewed world, born to the human pair Zeus had spared, and her very name carries the sense of the firstborn.2
Zeus came to her, and she bore him Aethlius. Through this son the line of the flood survivors is rejoined to the line of the god who had drowned the old race: Aethlius wedded Calyce, daughter of Aeolus, and their son was Endymion, who led Aeolians out of Thessaly and founded Elis. So Protogeneia stands at the hinge where the Deucalionid stem and the Aeolid house are knotted together.3
Pausanias, opening the early history of Elis, sets her at the root of the Elean kings. The first to rule that land, the Eleans say, was Aethlius, son of Zeus and of Protogeneia the daughter of Deucalion, and father of Endymion. Where Apollodorus interposes Calyce between Aethlius and Endymion, the Elean tradition makes Aethlius himself the father of the sleeper, with Protogeneia his mother by Zeus the constant in both reckonings.4
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story