Deucalion
（
Δευκαλίων). The son of Prometheus and Clymené,
or of Prometheus and Pandora, and sometimes called the father (
Thuc.i.
3), sometimes the brother of Hellen, the reputed founder of the Greek nation. His home
was Thessaly, from which, according to general tradition, he was driven to Parnassus by a
great deluge (
Apollod. i.7.2), which, however, according to
Aristotle (
Meteorol. i. 14) occurred between Dodona and the Acheloüs.
The Greek legend respecting this memorable event is as follows: Deucalion was married to
Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. When Zeus designed to destroy the brazen race
of men on account of their impiety, Deucalion, by the advice of his father, made himself an
ark (
λάρναξ), and, putting provisions into it, entered it
with his wife Pyrrha. Zeus then poured rain from heaven and inundated the greater part of
Greece, so that all the people, except a few who escaped to the lofty mountains, perished in
the waves. At the same time, the mountains of Thessaly were burst through by the flood, and
all Greece without the Isthmus, as well as all the Peloponnesus, were overflowed. Deucalion
was carried along the sea in his ark for nine days and nights, until he reached Mount
Parnassus. By this time the rain had ceased, and, leaving his ark, he sacrificed to Zeus the
flight-giver (
Φύξιος), who sent Hermes, desiring him to ask
what he would. His request was to have the earth replenished with men. By the direction of
Zeus, thereupon, he and his wife flung stones behind them, and those which Deucalion cast
became men, and those thrown by Pyrrha women; from which circumstance the Greeks derived
the name for “people” (
λαός) from
λᾶας, “a stone” (
Apollod. i.7.2).
This narrative restricts the general deluge to Greece proper, perhaps originally to
Thessaly; and it most incongruously represents others as having escaped as well as Deucalion;
while at the same time, it intimates that he and his wife alone had been preserved in the
catastrophe. The circumstance of the ark is thought by some to be borrowed from the Mosaic
account, and to have been learned at Alexandria, for we elsewhere find the dove noticed.
“The mythologists,” says Plutarch, “inform us that a dove let
fly out of the ark was to Deucalion a sign of bad weather if it came in again, of good weather
if it flew away” (
De Sollert. An.). The sacrifice and the appearance
of Hermes likewise strongly remind us of Noah. (See, also, the article
Apamea.) The Latin writers take a different view of the deluge. According
to them it overspread the whole earth, and all animal life perished except Deucalion and
Pyrrha, whom Ovid, who gives a very poetical account of this great catastrophe, conveys in a
small boat to the summit of Parnassus; while others make Aetna or Athos the mountain which
yielded them a refuge (Ovid,
Met. i. 253 foll.;
Hyg. Fab.
153;
Serv. ad
Eclog. vi. 41). According to Ovid they consulted the ancient oracle of Themis
respecting the restoration of mankind, and received the following response: “Depart
from the fane, veil your heads, loosen your girded vestments, and cast behind you the great
bones of your parent” (
Met. i. 381 foll.). They were at first horror-struck at such an act of
impiety, but at length Deucalion understood the words of the oracle as referring to the earth,
the common mother of all. Rationalizing mythologists make the story an allegory in which
Deucalion represents water (as if from
δεύω), and Pyrrha,
fire (
πῦρ). The meaning of the legend will then be, that when
the passage through which the Peneus carries off the waters that run into the vale of
Thessaly, which is on all sides shut in by lofty mountains, had been closed by some accident,
they overflowed the whole of its surface, till the action of subterranean fire opened a way
for them. According to this view of the subject, then, the deluge of Deucalion was merely a
local one; and it was not until the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, when the Hebrew Scriptures
became known to the Greeks, that some features borrowed from the universal deluge of Noah were
incorporated into the story of the Thessalian flood. See Harcourt,
Doctrine of
the Deluge (London, 1838); Sayce,
Fresh Light from the Ancient
Monuments (London, 1886); Motais,
Le Déluge
Biblique (Paris, 1887).
