Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/129

 DEUKALION, HELLEN AND SONS OF HELLEN. 97 deluge which transferred him from the one to the other ; but ac- cording to another statement, framed in more historicizing times, he conducted a body of Kuretes and Leleges into Thessaly, and expelled the prior Pelasgian occupants. 1 The enormous iniquity with which earth was contaminated as Apollodorus says, by the then existing brazen race, or as others say, by the fifty monstrous sons of Lykaon provoked Zeus to send a general deluge. 2 An unremitting and terrible rain laid the whole of Greece under water, except the highest mountain-tops, whereon a few stragglers found refuge. Deuka- lion was saved in a chest or ark, which he had been forewarned by his father Prometheus to construct. After floating for nine days on the water, he at length landed on the summit of Mount Parnassus. Zeus having sent Hermes to him, promising to grant whatever he asked, he prayed that men and companions might be sent to him in his solitude : accordingly Zeus directed both him and Pyrrha to cast stones over their heads : those cast by Pyrrha became women, those by Deukalion men. And thus the " stony race of men " (if we may be allowed to translate an ety- mology which the Greek language presents exactly, and which has not been disdained by Hesiod, by Pindar, by Epicharmus. and by Virgil) came to tenant the soil of Greece. 3 Deukalion 1 The latter account is given by Dionys. Halic. i. 1 7 ; the former seems to have been given by Hellanikus, who affirmed that the ark after the deluge stopped upon Mount Othrys, and not upon Mount Parnassus ( Schol. Find. ut. sup.) the former being suitable for a settlement in Thessaly. Pyrrha is the eponymous heroine of Pyrrhrea or Pyrrha, the ancient name of a portion of Thessaly (Rhianus, Fragm. 18. p. 71, ed, Diintzer). Hellanikus had written a work, nov lost, entitled AevKalauveia : all the fragments of it which are cited have reference to places in Thessaly, Lokris and Phokis. See Preller, ad Hellanitum, p. 12 (Dorpt. 1840). Probably Hellanikus is the main source of the important position occupied by Deuka- lion in Grecian legend. Thrasybulus and Akestodorus represented Deu- kalion as having founded the oracle of Dodona, immediately after the deluge (Etm. Mag. v. Aojdwvaiof ). 1 Apollodorus connects this deluge with the wickedness of the brazen race in Hesiod, according to the practice general with the logographers of string- ing together a sequence out of legends totally unconnected with each other (i- 7, 2). 3 Hesiod, Fragm. 135. ed. Markts. ap. Strabo. vii. p. 322, where the word Aaaf, proposed by Heyne as the reading of the unintelligible text, appears to TOL. I- 5 70C.