According tofolk etymology, Deucalion's name comes fromδεῦκος,deukos, a variant ofγλεῦκος,gleucos, i.e. "sweet new wine, must, sweetness"[3][4] and fromἁλιεύς,haliéus, i.e. "sailor, seaman, fisher".[5] His wifePyrrha's name derives from the adjectiveπυρρός, -ά, -όν,pyrrhós, -á, -ón, i.e. "flame-colored, orange".[6]
Of Deucalion's birth, theArgonautica[7] (from the 3rd century BC) stated:
There [inAchaea, i.e. Greece] is a land encircled by lofty mountains, rich in sheep and in pasture, wherePrometheus, son ofIapetus, 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 callHaemonia [i.e.Thessaly].
Deucalion’s and Pyrrha’s children are apparently named in one of the oldest texts,Catalogue of Women, include daughtersPandora andThyia, and at least one son, Hellen.[14] Their descendants were said to have dwelt and ruled in Thessaly.[15]
One source mentioned three sons of Deucalion and his wife:Orestheus,Marathonios andPronous (father of Hellen).[16][17] Lastly, Deucalion sired a son, no mention of the mother,Candybus who gave his name to the town ofCandyba inLycia.[18]
The flood in the time of Deucalion was caused by the anger ofZeus, ignited by thehubris ofLycaon and his sons, descendants ofPelasgus. According to this story, King Lycaon ofArcadia 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.[20] Like the biblicalNoah and the Mesopotamian counterpartUtnapishtim, he used this device to survive thegreat flood with his wife, Pyrrha.
The most complete accounts are given byOvid, in hisMetamorphoses (late 1 BCE to early 1 CE), and by the mythographerApollodorus (1st or 2nd century CE).[8] Deucalion, who reigned over the region ofPhthia,[21] 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 wifePyrrha, daughter ofEpimetheus, were the one surviving pair of humans. Their chest touched solid ground onMount Parnassus,[22] orMount Etna inSicily,[23] orMount Athos inChalkidiki,[24] orMount Othrys in Thessaly.[25]
Hyginus mentioned the opinion of aHegesianax that Deucalion is to be identified withAquarius, "because during his reign such quantities of water poured from the sky that the great Flood resulted."[26]
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 anoracle ofThemis 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" wasGaia, 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.[27] These people were later called theLeleges who populatedLocris.[28] This can be related toPindar'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."[29]
The 2nd-century AD writerLucian gave an account of the Greek Deucalion inDe Dea Syria that seems to refer more to the Near Eastern flood legends: in his version, Deucalion (whom he also callsSisythus)[30] took his children, their wives, and pairs of animals with him on the ark, and later built a great temple inManbij (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.[31]
On the other hand,Dionysius of Halicarnassus stated Deucalion's parents to be Prometheus and Clymene, daughter ofOceanus, and mentioned nothing about a flood but instead named him as commander of those from Parnassus who drove the "sixth generation" ofPelasgians from Thessaly.[32]
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 ofAetolia.[16] The much later geographerPausanias, following on this tradition, named Deucalion as a king ofOzolian Locris and father of Orestheus.
Plutarch mentioned a legend that Deucalion and Pyrrha had settled inDodona,Epirus;[33] whileStrabo asserted that they lived atCynus, and that her grave was still to be found there, while his may be seen atAthens.[34] This can be related to an account that after the deluge, Deucalion, founder and king ofLycoreia inMt. Parnassus[35] was said to have fled from his kingdom to Athens with his sons Hellen and Amphictyon during the reign of KingCranaus. Shortly thereafter, Deucalion died there and was said to have been buried near Athens.[36] During his stay in there, he was credited with having built the ancient sanctuary of Olympian Zeus.[37] Additionally, Strabo mentioned a pair ofAegean islands named after the couple.[38]
The 19th-century classicistJohn Lemprière, inBibliotheca 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."[39] 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.[40] 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.[41][42][43] 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.
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 archaeologicalstele known as theParian Chronicle, Deucalion's Flood was usually fixed as occurring some time around 1528 BC. Deucalion's flood may be dated in thechronology of SaintJerome toc. 1460 BC. According toAugustine of Hippo (City of God XVIII,8,10,&11), Deucalion and his father Prometheus were contemporaries of Moses. According toClement of Alexandria in hisStromata, "in the time ofCrotopus occurred the burning ofPhaethon, and the deluges of Deucalion."[44]
^Thescholia toOdyssey 10.2 names Clymene as the commonly identified mother, along with Hesione (citingAcusilaus,FGrH 2 F 34) and possibly Pronoia.
^Ascholium toOdyssey 10.2 (=Catalogue fr. 4) reports that Hesiod called Deucalion's mother "Pryneie" or "Prynoe", corrupt forms whichDindorf 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 fr. 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 theCatalogue.
^Hesiod,Ehoiai fr. 5 as cited inScholiast on Apollonius Rhodius, 4.265–426
^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 4F117, quoted by thescholia 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 theGilgamesh flood account" inGilgamesh 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 fromHomeric 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.
Deucalion[usurped] from Charles Smith,Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1867), with source citations and some variants not given here.
Deucalion from Carlos Parada,Genealogical Guide to Greek Mythology.