previous next

[2]

And Prometheus had a son Deucalion.1 He reigning in the regions about Phthia, married Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, the first woman fashioned by the gods.2 And when Zeus would destroy the men of the Bronze Age, Deucalion by the advice of Prometheus constructed a chest,3 and having stored it with provisions he embarked in it with Pyrrha. But Zeus by pouring heavy rain from heaven flooded the greater part of Greece, so that all men were destroyed, except a few who fled to the high mountains in the neighborhood. It was then that the mountains in Thessaly parted, and that all the world outside the Isthmus and Peloponnese was overwhelmed. But Deucalion, floating in the chest over the sea for nine days and as many nights, drifted to Parnassus, and there, when the rain ceased, he landed and sacrificed to Zeus, the god of Escape. And Zeus sent Hermes to him and allowed him to choose what he would, and he chose to get men. And at the bidding of Zeus he took up stones and threw them over his head, and the stones which Deucalion threw became men, and the stones which Pyrrha threw became women. Hence people were called metaphorically people ( laos) from laas, “ a stone. ”4 And Deucalion had children by Pyrrha, first Hellen, whose father some say was Zeus, and second Amphictyon, who reigned over Attica after Cranaus; and third a daughter Protogenia, who became the mother of Aethlius by Zeus.5


1 The whole of the following account of Deucalion and Pyrrha is quoted, with a few trifling verbal changes, by the Scholiast on Hom. Il. i.126, who cites Apollodorus as his authority.

2 As to the making of Pandora, see Hes. WD 60ff., Hes. Th. 571ff.; Hyginus, Fab. 142.

3 As to Deucalion's flood, see Lucian, De dea Syria 12ff.; Ov. Met. 1.125-415; Hyginus, Fab. 153; Serv. Verg. Ecl. 6.41; Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. Bode, i. pp. 57ff., 99 (First Vatican Mythographer 189; Second Vatican Mythographer 73); Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, i.146ff. Another person who is said to have escaped alive from the flood was a certain Cerambus: the story ran that the nymphs wafted him aloft on wings over the Thessalian mountains. See Ov. Met. 7.353ff.

4 Compare Pind. O. 9.41ff.; Hyginus, Fab. 153.

5 This passage as to the children of Deucalion is quoted by the Scholiast on Hom. Il. xiii.307, who names Apollodorus as his authority.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (Sir James George Frazer)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Thessaly (Greece) (1)
Phthia (1)
Peloponnesus (Greece) (1)
Parnassus (Greece) (1)
Greece (Greece) (1)
Attica (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (15 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: