Deucalion

Also Known As: Greek Deukalion, Δευκαλίων; called Sisythes at Hierapolis by Lucian; husband of Pyrrha, “the fiery one”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He survives the flood that ends the Bronze race and restocks the emptied world by throwing stones over his shoulder.
Role in Mythos: He is the hinge between the race Zeus destroyed and every Greek who came afterwards, and the ancestor from whom the Hellenic tribes trace their names.
Relation to Humans: Every human being in the Greek reckoning after the flood is either descended from him or grew out of a stone he or his wife threw. He is also the reason the Greeks called themselves what they did, since his son Hellen gave his name to the Hellenes.

The temple of Themis was still filthy when they reached it. Moss had gone slimy across the gables, the altars were cold, and river silt lay in the doorway in a soft grey tongue. Two people knelt on the step and put their trembling lips to the wet stone, and there was nobody left anywhere in the world to see them do it. That is the picture Ovid leaves of Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha: the last two human beings, asking a goddess how to start the species again.

Deucalion was the son of Prometheus, which is the only credential his story really needs. Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women names his mother as Pronoia; most later writers do not trouble to name her at all. He ruled in Phthia, in the north, over the stretch of Thessaly that Apollonius of Rhodes says he was the first man to govern, the first to found cities in, and the first to raise temples to the gods in. His wife was Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, and her name carries the sense of fire. Strabo records that Thessaly was once called Pyrrhaea after her, which is a rare thing for a woman in these genealogies.

The reason for the flood depends on who is telling it. Apollodorus has Zeus simply resolving to make an end of the men of the Bronze Age, and elsewhere in the same work he offers the sharper version: the Arcadian king Lycaon and his sons mixed the entrails of a slaughtered child into a meal and set it in front of Zeus disguised as a labourer, and the flood came out of that. Ovid keeps the cannibal banquet and has Zeus announce at a council of gods that one house was not the only house that deserved to perish. Hyginus supplies the strangest account of all, in which the deluge is a pretext: Phaethon had already crashed the sun’s chariot and set the world burning, and Jupiter, wanting a reason to be rid of mortals, let every river loose as though he only meant to put the fire out.

Prometheus saw it coming and told his son. Deucalion built a chest, stocked it with provisions, and got in with Pyrrha. Then the rain came down out of heaven and drowned most of Greece. The mountains of Thessaly split apart under the weight of water; everything outside the Isthmus and the Peloponnese went under, and the few who lived did so by running uphill. The chest drifted for nine days and nine nights.

It grounded on Parnassus, in the common telling, though Parnassus is not the only mountain that claimed the landing. Some put it on Othrys in Thessaly, some on Athos, and Hyginus lands the couple on Etna in Sicily on the grounds that it is the tallest thing in the island. Wherever it touched, the first thing Deucalion did on dry rock was build a fire to Zeus Phyxios, Zeus of the Escape, and in Apollodorus the god sent Hermes down to offer him whatever he wanted. He asked for people. Not power, not a kingdom, not his own life extended. People.

The oracle he got in return was a riddle, and in Ovid it comes from Themis herself: go away from here, cover your heads, loosen your robes, and throw behind you the bones of your great mother. Pyrrha refused outright. She would not disturb her mother’s bones or offend the spirit in them, and she said so to the goddess’s face. It was Deucalion who worked it out, on the reasoning that oracles do not command wicked things: their mother is the Earth, and the bones of the Earth are stones. So they came down from the temple with their heads veiled and their belts undone, picked up what was lying about, and threw it behind them without looking.

The stones softened as they fell. Ovid gives the process an almost surgical attention: the damp and earthy parts of each stone turned to flesh, the hard and brittle parts became bone, and the veins in the rock kept the name they already had. Every stone Deucalion threw stood up a man and every stone from Pyrrha’s hand stood up a woman, and the Greeks explained their own word for a people, laos, out of laas, a stone. The two words are not actually related. That resemblance looks far less like evidence for the story than like the thing that grew it.

Deucalion and Pyrrha were never quite alone in this, whatever Ovid says, because too many places wanted a piece of the survival. At Megara they told of Megarus, a son of Zeus, who swam toward the crying of cranes until the birds brought him to the top of a mountain that took its name from them. The people of Parnassus escaped their drowned city by following the howling of wolves to the summit and founding Lycoreia up there. Cerambus was lifted clear of the water on wings by nymphs and set down on Othrys. Dardanus reached Mount Ida. Poseidon, in the version the painters liked, broke the Thessalian mountains apart with his trident at Tempe to let the trapped water out of the plain. Lucian heard the story much further east, at Hierapolis in Syria, where Deucalion went by the name Sisythes, loaded his children and their wives and animals in pairs, and afterwards founded a temple over the chasm that had swallowed the flood; twice a year the priests still carried sea water up and poured it in.

For a man with no attested face, he left a great deal of furniture behind. Cynus, on the Locrian coast, showed visitors the grave of Pyrrha. Athens showed his, close by the sanctuary of Zeus Olympios that the Athenians insisted he had built, where a cleft about a cubit wide opened in the precinct floor and was pointed out as the drain the flood water had left by, and where every year they threw down wheat meal mixed with honey. Two small islands off the Phthiotic coast carried the couple’s names. Hegesianax went further and made him the constellation Aquarius, on the grounds that the water in his reign had come down from the sky in such quantities.

What descends from him is the entire Greek family tree. Apollodorus gives him Hellen, Amphictyon, who ruled Attica, and a daughter Protogeneia; Hesiod adds Thyia and a Pandora named for her grandmother. Hellen fathered Dorus, Xuthus and Aeolus, and Xuthus fathered Achaeus and Ion, and every tribal name in Greece hangs off that list. Herodotus dates the Hellenes’ occupation of Phthia to the days of king Deucalion as though it were a reign to be counted, and Plato has Solon try to reckon actual years off the same genealogy in an Egyptian temple, only to be told the Greeks are children who remember one flood.

Set against all that, his own abilities are almost comically thin. He has no powers. He is not a demigod, he does not fight anything, he carries no weapon and works no wonder; his gifts are a warning received in time, the piety to light a fire before doing anything else, and the wit to read one sentence correctly when his wife could not bear to. Ovid puts the limit in his own mouth, standing in the silent world and wishing he had his father’s art, wishing he could breathe the shape of man into wet clay, and knowing perfectly well that he cannot. He could not make a single person. He could only be told where to look and then throw a rock behind him without turning round, and what came up out of the mud, Virgil says, was a stony race, hardy enough to prove by labour what it was made from.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Deucalion in Greek mythology?

Deucalion is the son of the Titan Prometheus and the man who survived the great flood Zeus sent to destroy the Bronze race of humanity. He ruled in Phthia in northern Greece and rode out the deluge in a wooden chest with his wife Pyrrha. Afterwards the two of them repopulated the earth, and Deucalion’s son Hellen became the ancestor the Greeks named themselves after.

How did Deucalion and Pyrrha survive the flood?

Prometheus warned Deucalion in advance, and Deucalion built a chest, stocked it with provisions and boarded it with Pyrrha. According to Apollodorus the chest drifted for nine days and nine nights before grounding on Mount Parnassus. Other local traditions claimed the landing for Mount Othrys, Mount Athos, or even Etna in Sicily.

Why did Deucalion throw stones over his shoulder?

An oracle told Deucalion and Pyrrha to veil their heads and throw the bones of their great mother behind them. Pyrrha refused at first, fearing she was being told to desecrate her mother’s remains, but Deucalion reasoned that their mother was the Earth and her bones were stones. The stones they threw softened and became people, men from Deucalion’s and women from Pyrrha’s.

Is Deucalion the Greek version of Noah?

The two stories share a divine decision to drown humanity, a warned survivor, a vessel and a landing on a mountain, and ancient writers as far east as Syria told Deucalion’s flood alongside local versions. The Greek myth differs sharply in what comes after: Noah’s family repopulates the world by ordinary descent, while Deucalion and Pyrrha are given a second human race made out of thrown stones.

What powers did Deucalion have?

None. Deucalion is a mortal king with no supernatural abilities, no weapon and no monster to fight; his survival rests on a timely warning from his father and his own piety and quick reading of a riddle. In Ovid he says outright that he wishes he had Prometheus’s skill to shape people from clay and knows that he does not.