Deucalion

• 1. Introduction

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  Deucalion, a figure from Greek mythology, once received an order that sounded like nonsense: "cover your head and throw the bones of your mother behind your shoulder." An oracle gave him this instruction after a flood had swept across the world he knew. Whose bones could he possibly mean, and how could throwing them rebuild anything? The answer turns a scene of ruin into the start of a new humanity. Yet the man at the centre of it is slippery. Ancient writers disagree about his family, about where he lived, and even about whether his story includes a flood at all. Those disagreements, and the efforts of later scholars to pin him to a date, are part of what makes him worth following.

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• 2. Rising Waters

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  In Arcadia, King Lycaon made an offering that appalled Zeus: he sacrificed a boy. Lycaon and his sons were descendants of Pelasgus, and their arrogance ignited the god's anger. Zeus decided to bring the "Bronze" Age to an end with a deluge. The flood that followed was total. Rivers ran in torrents, the sea spilled over the coastal plain, and spray engulfed the foothills. The water washed everything clean. Only one man had been warned in advance, and the warning came from his own father.

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• 3. The Chest

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  Prometheus, according to the fullest accounts, told his son Deucalion what was coming. Those accounts come from Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, and from the mythographer Apollodorus, writing in the 1st or 2nd century CE. Deucalion reigned over the region of Phthia. He built a chest and provisioned it with care. In this version no animals are rescued. After nine days the waters receded, and Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus, were the one surviving pair of humans. Like the biblical Noah and the Mesopotamian Utnapishtim, he rode out the flood in a vessel built for the purpose. Sources disagree about where the chest came to rest. Candidates include Mount Parnassus, Mount Etna in Sicily, Mount Athos in Chalkidiki, and Mount Othrys in Thessaly. Hyginus preserved a curious opinion from a writer named Hegesianax, who identified Deucalion with the constellation Aquarius, "because during his reign such quantities of water poured from the sky that the great Flood resulted."

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• 4. Stones Into People

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  Several sources give Deucalion's age as 82 when the flood ended. He and Pyrrha gave thanks to Zeus, and then he consulted an oracle of Themis about how to repopulate the earth. The couple worked out the riddle together. The "mother" was Gaia, the mother of all living things, and her "bones" were rocks. They threw stones behind their shoulders, and the stones became people. Pyrrha's stones became women, and Deucalion's became men. These people were later called the Leleges, who populated Locris. Pindar told a similar story. In his account, "Pyrrha and Deucalion came down from Parnassus and made their first home, and without the marriage-bed they founded a unified race of stone offspring, and the stones gave the people their name." Even so, other sources credit the couple with children born in the ordinary way, and those lists do not agree.

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• 5. Family And Name

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  The Argonautica, written in the 3rd century BC, describes a land encircled by lofty mountains and rich in sheep and pasture. Neighbours called it Haemonia, which is Thessaly. There, in the poem's words, Prometheus, son of Iapetus, begat "goodly Deucalion, who first founded cities and reared temples to the immortal gods, and first ruled over men." Ancient sources name his mother as Clymene, Hesione, or Pronoia. Bibliotheca gives Deucalion and Pyrrha at least two children, Hellen and Protogenea, and possibly a third, Amphictyon. Another account adds a daughter, Melanthea, also called Melantho, who became the mother of Delphus by Poseidon. One of the oldest texts, the Catalogue of Women, apparently names daughters Pandora and Thyia and at least one son, Hellen. A different source lists three sons: Orestheus, Marathonios, and Pronous, who was the father of Hellen. Deucalion also fathered Candybus, whose name lives on in the town of Candyba in Lycia. Descendants of the couple were said to have dwelt and ruled in Thessaly. His name has its own folk etymology. It is traced to deukos, a variant of gleucos, meaning sweet new wine, and to haliéus, meaning sailor or fisher. His wife's name, Pyrrha, comes from a word meaning flame-colored, or orange.

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• 6. Stories Without A Flood

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  Dionysius of Halicarnassus named Prometheus and Clymene, daughter of Oceanus, as Deucalion's parents and said nothing about a flood. In his telling, Deucalion commanded the men from Parnassus who drove the "sixth generation" of Pelasgians out of Thessaly. Hecataeus of Miletus, one of the earliest Greek historians, was said to have written a whole book about Deucalion, but it has not survived. The only surviving fragment that mentions him also skips the flood and calls him the father of Orestheus, king of Aetolia. The much later geographer Pausanias followed that tradition and made Deucalion a king of Ozolian Locris. Plutarch recorded a legend that Deucalion and Pyrrha settled in Dodona, in Epirus. Strabo placed them at Cynus, where he said her grave could still be found, while his could be seen at Athens. A related account has Deucalion, founder and king of Lycoreia on Mount Parnassus, flee to Athens with his sons Hellen and Amphictyon during the reign of King Cranaus. He died there soon afterward and was buried near the city. During his stay he was credited with building the ancient sanctuary of Olympian Zeus. Strabo also mentioned a pair of Aegean islands named after the couple.

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• 7. Lucian's Syrian Temple

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  The writer Lucian, in the 2nd century AD, gave an account of the Greek Deucalion in his work De Dea Syria. It seems to draw more on Near Eastern flood legends. Lucian also calls his hero Sisythus. In this version Deucalion takes his children, their wives, and pairs of animals aboard an ark. Afterward he builds a great temple in Manbij, in northern Syria, on the site of the chasm that swallowed all the waters. Twice a year, pilgrims carried vessels of sea water to this place to commemorate the event. They came from as far away as Arabia and Mesopotamia. Details like the ark and the animals raise a question that scholars have debated for a long time: where did the Greek versions get them?

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• 8. Reading The Flood

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  For some time during the Middle Ages, many European Christian scholars accepted Greek mythical history at face value. They treated Deucalion's flood as a regional event that came a few centuries after the global one survived by Noah's family. The archaeological stele known as the Parian Chronicle usually fixed it around 1528 BC, while the chronology of Saint Jerome gave c. 1460 BC. Augustine of Hippo, in City of God, made Deucalion and Prometheus contemporaries of Moses. Clement of Alexandria wrote in his Stromata that "in the time of Crotopus occurred the burning of Phaethon, and the deluges of Deucalion." The 19th-century classicist John Lemprière, in Bibliotheca Classica, offered a different explanation. He argued that the story gathered details from Noah as it was retold. Apollodorus supplied a great chest, Plutarch the pigeons sent out to test whether the waters had receded, and Lucian the animals of every kind. The Epic of Gilgamesh, however, contains all three elements. They are a means of safety, birds sent forth to test the waters, and animals stowed on the boat. Lemprière could not have known this. The Assyrian cuneiform tablets bearing the epic were not discovered until the 1850s, about 20 years after his book appeared. Gilgamesh is widely considered at least as old as Genesis, if not older. Given how widely religious ideas mixed in the ancient Greek world, some Greek-speaking peoples may have known these elements through oral tellings long before anyone wrote them down. The immediate source of the three details in the later Greek versions remains unclear. The name has traveled far beyond antiquity. A trans-Neptunian object discovered in 1999, catalogued as (53311) Deucalion, was named in his honor.

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