According to
folk etymology, Deucalion's name comes from δεῦκος, deukos, a variant of γλεῦκος, gleucos, i.e. "sweet new wine, must, sweetness"[3][4] and from ἁλιεύς, haliéus, i.e. "sailor, seaman, fisher".[5] His wife
Pyrrha's name derives from the adjective πυρρός, -ά, -όν, pyrrhós, -á, -ón, i.e. "flame-colored, orange".[6]
Family
Of Deucalion's birth, the Argonautica[7] (from the 3rd century BC) stated:
There [in
Achaea, i.e. Greece] is a land encircled by lofty mountains, rich in sheep and in pasture, where
Prometheus, son of
Iapetus, begat goodly Deucalion, who first founded cities and reared temples to the immortal gods, and first ruled over men. This land the neighbours who dwell around call Haemonia [i.e.
Thessaly].
Their children as apparently named in one of the oldest texts, Catalogue of Women, include daughters
Pandora and
Thyia, and at least one son, Hellen.[11] Their descendants were said to have dwelt and ruled in Thessaly.[12]
The flood in the time of Deucalion was caused by the anger of
Zeus, ignited by the
hubris of
Lycaon and his sons, descendants of
Pelasgus. According to this story, King Lycaon of
Arcadia had sacrificed a boy to Zeus, who, appalled by this offering, decided to put an end to the
"Bronze" Age by unleashing a deluge. During this catastrophic flood, the rivers ran in torrents and the sea flooded the coastal plain, engulfing the foothills with spray, and washing everything clean.
Deucalion, with the aid of his father Prometheus, was saved from this deluge by building a chest.[18] Like the biblical
Noah and the Mesopotamian counterpart
Utnapishtim, he used this device to survive the
great flood with his wife, Pyrrha.
The most complete accounts are given by
Ovid, in his Metamorphoses (late 1 BCE to early 1 CE), and by the mythographer
Apollodorus (1st or 2nd century CE).[19] Deucalion, who reigned over the region of
Phthia,[20] had been forewarned of the flood by his father Prometheus. Deucalion was to build a chest and provision it carefully (no animals are rescued in this version of the flood myth), so that when the waters receded after nine days, he and his wife
Pyrrha, daughter of
Epimetheus, were the one surviving pair of humans. Their chest touched solid ground on
Mount Parnassus,[21] or
Mount Etna in
Sicily,[22] or
Mount Athos in
Chalkidiki,[23] or
Mount Othrys in Thessaly.[24]
Hyginus mentioned the opinion of a
Hegesianax that Deucalion is to be identified with
Aquarius, "because during his reign such quantities of water poured from the sky that the great Flood resulted."
Once the deluge was over and the couple had given thanks to Zeus, Deucalion (said in several of the sources to have been aged 82 at the time) consulted an
oracle of
Themis about how to repopulate the earth. He was told to "cover your head and throw the bones of your mother behind your shoulder". Deucalion and Pyrrha understood that "mother" was
Gaia, the mother of all living things, and the "bones" to be rocks. They threw the rocks behind their shoulders and the stones formed people. Pyrrha's became women; Deucalion's became men.[25] These people were later called the
Leleges who populated
Locris.[26] This can be related to
Pindar's account that recounted ". . .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."[27]
The 2nd-century AD writer
Lucian gave an account of the Greek Deucalion in De Dea Syria that seems to refer more to the Near Eastern flood legends: in his version, Deucalion (whom he also calls Sisythus)[28] took his children, their wives, and pairs of animals with him on the ark, and later built a great temple in
Manbij (northern Syria), on the site of the chasm that received all the waters; he further describes how pilgrims brought vessels of sea water to this place twice a year, from as far as Arabia and Mesopotamia, to commemorate this event.[29]
Variant stories
On the other hand,
Dionysius of Halicarnassus stated Deucalion's parents to be Prometheus and
Clymene, daughter of
Oceanus, and mentioned nothing about a flood but instead named him as commander of those from Parnassus who drove the "sixth generation" of
Pelasgians from Thessaly.[30]
One of the earliest Greek historians,
Hecataeus of Miletus, was said to have written a book about Deucalion, but it no longer survived. The only extant fragment of his to mention Deucalion does not mention the flood either, but named him as the father of Orestheus, king of
Aetolia. The much later geographer
Pausanias, following on this tradition, named Deucalion as a king of
Ozolian Locris and father of Orestheus.
Plutarch mentioned a legend that Deucalion and Pyrrha had settled in
Dodona,
Epirus;[31] while
Strabo asserted that they lived at
Cynus, and that her grave was still to be found there, while his may be seen at
Athens.[32] This can be related to an account that after the deluge, Deucalion, founder and king of
Lycoreia in
Mt. Parnassus[33] was said to have fled from his kingdom to Athens with his sons Hellen and Amphictyon during the reign of King
Cranaus. Shortly thereafter, Deucalion died there and was said to have been buried near Athens.[34] During his stay in there, he was credited with having built the ancient sanctuary of Olympian Zeus.[35] Additionally, Strabo mentioned a pair of
Aegean islands named after the couple.[36]
Interpretation
Mosaic accretions
The 19th-century classicist
John Lemprière, in Bibliotheca Classica, argued that as the story had been re-told in later versions, it accumulated details from the stories of Noah: "Thus Apollodorus gives Deucalion a great chest as a means of safety; Plutarch speaks of the pigeons by which he sought to find out whether the waters had receded; and Lucian of the animals of every kind which he had taken with him. &c."[37] However, the Epic of Gilgamesh contains each of the three elements identified by Lemprière: a means of safety (in the form of instructions to build a boat), sending forth birds to test whether the waters had receded, and stowing animals of every kind on the boat. These facts were unknown to Lemprière because the Assyrian cuneiform tablets containing the Gilgamesh Epic were not discovered until in the 1850s.[38] This was 20 years after Lemprière had published his "Bibliotheca Classica". The Gilgamesh epic is widely considered to be at least as old as Genesis, if not older.[39][40][41] Given the prevalence of religious syncretism in the ancient Greek world, these three elements may already have been known to some Greek-speaking peoples in popular oral variations of the flood myth, long before they were recorded in writing. The most immediate source of these three particular elements in the later Greek versions is unclear.
Dating by early scholars
For some time during the Middle Ages, many European Christian scholars continued to accept Greek mythical history at face value, thus asserting that Deucalion's flood was a regional flood, that occurred a few centuries later than the global one survived by Noah's family. On the basis of the archaeological stele known as the
Parian Chronicle, Deucalion's Flood was usually fixed as occurring some time around 1528 BC. Deucalion's flood may be dated in the
chronology of Saint
Jerome to
c. 1460 BC. According to
Augustine of Hippo (City of God XVIII,8,10,&11), Deucalion and his father Prometheus were contemporaries of Moses. According to
Clement of Alexandria in his
Stromata, "...in the time of
Crotopus occurred the burning of
Phaethon, and the deluges of Deucalion."[42]
Notes
^The
scholia to Odyssey 10.2 names Clymene as the commonly identified mother, along with Hesione (citing
Acusilaus, FGrH 2 F 34) and possibly Pronoia.
^A
scholium to Odyssey 10.2 (=Catalogue fr. 4) reports that Hesiod called Deucalion's mother "Pryneie" or "Prynoe", corrupt forms which
Dindorf believed to conceal Pronoea's name. The emendation is considered to have "undeniable merit" by A. Casanova (1979) La famiglia di Pandora: analisi filologica dei miti di Pandora e Prometeo nella tradizione esiodea. Florence, p. 145.
^Hes. Catalogue fragments 2, 5 and 7; cf. M.L. West (1985) The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Oxford, pp. 50–2, who posits that a third daughter, Protogeneia, who was named at (e.g.) Pausanias,
5.1.3, was also present in the Catalogue.
^Pleins, J. David (2010). When the great abyss opened : classic and contemporary readings of Noah's flood ([Online-Ausg.]. ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. p. 110.
ISBN978-0-19-973363-7.
^Hellanicus, FGrH 4 F 117, quoted by the
scholia to Pindar, Olympia 9.62b: "Hellanicus says that the chest didn't touch down on Parnassus, but by Othrys in Thessaly.
^Parker, Janet; Stanton, Julie, eds. (2008) [2003]. "Greek and Roman Mythology". Mythology: Myths, Legends, & Fantasies (Reprinted ed.). Lane Cove, NSW, Australia:
Global Book Publishing. pp. 32–35.
ISBN978-1-74048-091-8.
^Rendsburg, Gary. "The Biblical flood story in the light of the Gilgamesh flood account" in Gilgamesh and the world of Assyria, eds Azize, J & Weeks, N. Peters, 2007, p. 117
^Wexler, Robert (2001). Ancient Near Eastern Mythology.
Gaius Julius Hyginus, Fabulae from The Myths of Hyginus translated and edited by Mary Grant. University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies.
Online version at the Topos Text Project.
Hesiod, Catalogue of Women from Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica translated by Evelyn-White, H G. Loeb Classical Library Volume 57. London: William Heinemann, 1914.
Online version at theio.com
Pindar, The Odes of Pindar including the Principal Fragments with an Introduction and an English Translation by Sir John Sandys, Litt.D., FBA. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1937.
Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.