Deucalion, son of Prometheus, and Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus, are the sole human survivors of the flood in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 1.
They are depicted as pious individuals who worship the gods after landing on Mount Parnassus. Following an oracle from Themis, they repopulate the earth by throwing stones behind them, which transform into humans. This act symbolizes renewal after destruction.
The relevant verses from Book 1 (lines 348–437, A.S. Kline’s English translation) are as follows:
Bk I:348-415 Deucalion and Pyrrha
The world was restored. But when Deucalion saw its emptiness, and the deep silence of the desolate lands, he spoke to Pyrrha, through welling tears. ‘Wife, cousin, sole surviving woman, joined to me by our shared race, our family origins, then by the marriage bed, and now joined to me in danger, we two are the people of all the countries seen by the setting and the rising sun, the sea took all the rest. Even now our lives are not guaranteed with certainty: the storm clouds still terrify my mind.
How would you feel now, poor soul, if the fates had willed you to be saved, but not me? How could you endure your fear alone? Who would comfort your tears? Believe me, dear wife, if the sea had you, I would follow you, and the sea would have me too. If only I, by my father’s arts, could recreate earth’s peoples, and breathe life into the shaping clay!
The human race remains in us. The gods willed it that we are the only examples of mankind left behind.’ He spoke and they wept, resolving to appeal to the sky-god, and ask his help by sacred oracles. Immediately they went side by side to the springs of Cephisus, that, though not yet clear, still flowed in its usual course.
When they had sprinkled their faces and clothes with its water, they turned their steps to the temple of the sacred goddess, its gables yellow with foul moss, its altars without fire.
When they reached the steps of the sanctuary they fell forward on the ground, and trembling kissed the cold stone, and said ‘If the gods’ wills soften, appeased by the prayers of the just, if in this way their anger can be deflected, Themis tell us by what art the damage to our race can be repaired, and bring help, most gentle one, to this drowned world!’
The goddess was moved, and uttered oracular speech:
‘Leave the temple and with veiled heads and loosened clothes throw behind you the bones of your great mother!’
For a long time they stand there, dumbfounded. Pyrrha breaks the silence first, refusing to obey the goddess’s command. Her lips trembling, she asks for pardon, fearing to offend her mother’s spirit by scattering her bones.
Meanwhile they reconsider the words of the oracle given, that hide their true meaning under dark obscurity, and ponder them in their minds. Then Prometheus’s son comforts Epimetheus’s daughter with calm words: ‘Either my reasoning deceives me, or, since oracles are divine and never direct wickedness, our great mother is the earth: I think the bones she speaks about are stones in the body of the earth. It is stones we are told to throw behind our backs!’
Though Titania is stirred by her husband’s interpretation, the hope is uncertain: they are both so doubtful of the divine command, but what harm will it do to try?
They descend, veil their heads, unfasten their robes, and throw the stones behind them as the goddess has asked.
The stones (who would believe it if it were not for ancient tradition) began to lose their hardness and rigidity, and after a while softened, and once softened took on form. Then they grew, and became more gentle in nature, showing a vague likeness to human shape, like marble statues at first roughed out and scarcely formed, or not properly finished, when the sculptor’s hand has outlined them. The earthy part, however, wet with moisture, turned to flesh; what was solid, and could not be bent, changed to bone; what had been veins remained, but under the same name.
And in a short time, through the power of the gods, the stones thrown by the man’s hand took on the appearance of men, and women were recreated from those thrown by the woman. So we are a hard race, proving our lineage, and our endurance of labour.
Bk I:416-437 The Earth is repopulated
Other animals, of their own accord, the earth brings forth in diverse species, after the remaining moisture has warmed in the sun’s fire. So when the seven-mouthed Nile leaves the soaked fields and returns to its former bed, and the fresh mud is heated by the sun, and farmers find many creatures as they turn the lumps of earth.
Among them some, at the moment of birth, are complete and fully formed, and others are unfinished and lacking in equal proportions.
Indeed, when moisture and heat unite, they conceive, and all things come from those two.
Though fire and water are incompatible, moist heat creates everything, and the discordant harmony is suited to generation.
So, when earth, caked in mud from the recent flood, possessed the sun’s heat after the high water had remained on it, she produced innumerable species, partly re-creating previous forms, partly generating new monsters.
Indeed, though she might not wish it, then she bore you, too, great Python, covering so many acres of the mountain slopes, a snake not known before, a terror to the new race of men, so huge.
The archer god, who had never before used such weapons, except against does and fleeing goats, destroyed the monster with a thousand arrows, his quiver almost emptied, the venom running out from the black wounds. And so that time might not erase the fame of the deed, he founded the sacred Pythian games, celebrated by contests, named from the serpent he conquered. There the young winners in boxing, in foot and chariot racing, were honoured with oak wreaths. There was no laurel as yet, so Apollo crowned his temples, his handsome curling hair, with leaves of any tree.
