The Greek flood myth, told most fully in Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which Zeus destroys the impious Bronze Age of humanity with a flood, and only Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha survive by riding out the waters in a chest. Consulting the oracle of Themis afterward, the couple repopulate the devastated world by throwing stones, "the bones of their great mother" the earth, behind them, which become men from Deucalion's stones and women from Pyrrha's.
Facts
History
Historical NoteDeucalion's father Prometheus, already bound and punished for stealing fire, is the one who warns his son of the coming flood and instructs him to build the chest that saves him and Pyrrha, giving the Greek flood story its own forewarned builder figure. 1 Historical NoteMost versions place the ark's landing on Mount Parnassus, above Delphi, tying the flood story to the sanctuary's own foundation traditions in Greek local lore. 1 Historical NoteOvid places the story within a larger sequence explaining the mythical Ages of Man, following directly after his account of the corrupted Bronze Age's destruction, in Metamorphoses Book 1. 1 Meaning
Central MotifSole righteous survivors repopulate the world 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteApollodorus's Bibliotheca adds a detail absent from Ovid's later, more famous telling: that Zeus's flood was aimed specifically at destroying the bronze race of men for their violence and impiety, following directly on from the myth of Lycaon, whose transformation into a wolf after testing Zeus with human flesh is what provokes the deluge in that version. 2 Scholarly NoteScholars read the story, in which the surviving pair repopulate the earth by throwing stones behind them that become people, as a Greek variant of the widespread ancient Near Eastern flood and renewal pattern also attested in Mesopotamian and biblical accounts. 2 Text
Source TextOvid, Metamorphoses, Book 1 1 Controversy
Point in DisputeAncient genealogies do not agree on Deucalion's parentage or on which children followed the flood: Hesiod's Catalogue makes him the son of Prometheus and names Hellen, ancestor of the Hellenes, among his and Pyrrha's children, a detail later sources handle inconsistently. 1 Sources
Primary SourceThe myth is attested well before Ovid: fragments of Hesiod's Catalogue of Women, and a surviving line of Pindar's Ninth Olympian Ode stating that mortals were made from stones and so were called laoi, both predate Ovid's account by several centuries. 2 Learn More
The Flood on Parnassus
Ovid's Metamorphoses places the flood of Deucalion in the aftermath of the story of Lycaon, a king who, testing whether his visitor was truly a god, served Zeus a meal that included human flesh; Zeus, disgusted at the impiety of the whole Bronze Age generation Lycaon exemplified, resolves to destroy humanity and turns Lycaon himself into a wolf as a foretaste of the punishment to come. Rejecting fire as a means, for fear of setting the heavens themselves alight, Zeus instead unleashes every rain cloud in the sky and asks his brother Poseidon to add the rivers and the sea, until the whole earth is submerged and only the peak of Mount Parnassus, in some versions Mount Othrys, remains above the waves.
Only two mortals survive: Deucalion, son of the fire-bringing Titan Prometheus, and his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. Warned in advance by his father to prepare a vessel, Deucalion builds a wooden chest and rides out the flood with Pyrrha inside it, coming to rest on the mountain as the waters recede. Finding themselves the last two people alive in a silent, mud-covered world, the couple weep and pray at the nearby shrine of the goddess Themis, asking how humanity might be restored.
The Bones of the Earth
Themis answers in a riddle: leave the temple, veil your heads, loosen the garments girt about you, and throw behind you the bones of your great mother. Pyrrha refuses at first, unwilling to offend her mother's ghost by scattering her bones, but Deucalion works out the oracle's true meaning: their great mother is the earth itself, and her bones are the stones lying on its surface. Turning away from the shrine and walking forward, the couple throw stones over their shoulders as instructed, and the stones begin to soften, take on rough human shape, and grow into people, those thrown by Deucalion becoming men and those thrown by Pyrrha becoming women.
Ovid frames the pair explicitly as the most righteous man and most scrupulously devout woman alive, the sole justification the gods find for sparing anyone at all, which gives the Greek version a moral logic close to that of other ancient Near Eastern flood stories even though its mechanics, a stone-born second humanity rather than descent from the survivors themselves, are distinctively Greek. Deucalion and Pyrrha's son Hellen is remembered in Greek tradition as the eponymous ancestor of the Hellenes, tying the flood story directly into the origin of the Greeks as a people.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
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Deucalion and Pyrrha is the Greek account Flood myth doctrine's own description names.
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