Deucalion's Flood
In brief
- Zeus judged the human race past saving and drowned it, sending rain until the sea closed over everything but the highest peaks.
- Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, the one just pair left, rode out the flood in a wooden chest and grounded on Mount Parnassus.
- Told to throw "the bones of their mother" behind them, they worked out that the earth was meant, and the stones they threw stood up as men and women.
Zeus came down to see for himself whether the reports about the age of iron were true, and found them understated. He considered burning the world clean, then thought better of it, fire that size might catch the sky as well, and chose water instead.
He shut away the north wind that scatters cloud and let the south wind out, and it came dripping, its beard heavy with rain. Poseidon called up the rivers to help. The sea took the plains, then the orchards, then the temple roofs. Fish hung in the branches of elms. What swimmers there were drowned soon enough, and the rest had drowned already.
Two people were left. Deucalion, Prometheus's son, and Pyrrha, who was Pandora's daughter, floated in a wooden chest and came aground on Parnassus when the water dropped. They found the world empty and went to the ruined shrine of Themis to ask what they were supposed to do with it. The answer was to veil their heads, loosen their clothes, and throw their great mother's bones behind them.
Pyrrha refused outright: she would not scatter her mother's bones. It was Deucalion who saw it: the great mother is the earth, and her bones are stones. They walked down the slope throwing stones over their shoulders without looking back, and behind them the stones softened, lengthened and stood up. His became men; hers became women. It is why the race is hard, Ovid says, and used to labour.
