Legends of a destructive deluge, in which the greater part of mankind perished, meet us in the literature of ancient Greece. As told by the mythographer Apollodorus, the story runs thus: "Deucalion was the son of Prometheus. He reigned as king in the country about Phthia and married Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, the first woman fashioned by the gods. But when Zeus wished to destroy the men of the Bronze Age, Deucalion by the advice of Prometheus constructed a chest or ark, and having stored in it what was needful he entered into it with his wife. But Zeus poured a great rain from the sky upon the earth and washed down the greater part of Greece, so that all men perished except a few, who flocked to the high mountains near. Then the mountains in Thessaly were parted, and all the world beyond the Isthmus and Peloponnese was overwhelmed. But Deucalion in the ark, floating over the sea for nine days and as many nights, grounded on Parnassus, and there, when the rains ceased, he disembarked and sacrificed to Zeus, the God of Escape.
And Zeus sent Hermes to him and allowed him to choose what he would, and he chose men. And at the bidding of Zeus he picked up stones and threw them over his head ; and the stones which Deucalion threw became men, and the stones which Pyrrha threw became women. That is why in Greek people are called laoi from laas, 'a stone.' "
In this form the Greek legend is not older than about the middle of the second century before our era, the time when Apollodorus wrote, but in substance it is much more ancient, for the story was told by Hellanicus, a Greek historian of the fifth century B.C., who said that Deucalion's ark drifted not to Parnassus but to Mount Othrys in Thessaly.
The other version has the authority of Pindar, who wrote earlier than Hellanicus in the fifth century B.C. ; for the poet speaks of Deucalion and Pyrrha descending from Parnassus and creating the human race afresh out of stones. According to some, the first city which they founded after the great flood was Opus, situated in the fertile Locrian plain between the mountains and the Euboic Gulf. But Deucalion is reported to have dwelt at Cynus, the port of Opus, distant a few miles across the plain; and there his wife's tomb was shown to travellers down to the beginning of our era Her husband's dust is said to have rested at Athens.
The coast of Locris, thus associated with traditions of the great flood, is rich in natural beauties. The road runs at the foot of the mountains, which are of soft and lovely outlines, for the most part covered with forest; while the low hills and glades by the sea are wooded with pines, plane-trees, myrtles, lentisks, and other trees and shrubs, their luxuriant verdure fed by abundant springs Across the blue waters of the gulf the eye roams to the island of Euboea, with its winding shores and long line of finely cut mountains standing out against the sky The home of Deucalion was on a promontory jutting into the gulf On it, and on the isthmus which joins it to the land, may still be seen the mouldering ruins of Cynus: a line of fortification walls, built of sandstone, runs round the edge of the height, and the summit is crowned by the remains of a mediaeval tower. The ground is littered with ancient potsherds.
It is said that an ancient city on Parnassus was overwhelmed by the rains which caused the deluge, but the inhabitants, guided by the howling of wolves, found their way to the peaks of the mountain, and when the flood had subsided they descended and built a new city, which they called Lycorea or Wolf-town in gratitude for the guidance of the wolves Lucian speaks of Deucalion's ark, with the solitary survivors of the human race, grounding on what was afterwards the site of Wolf-town, while as yet all the rest of the world was submerged.
But according to another account, the mountain to which Deucalion escaped was a peak in Argolis, which was afterwards called Nemea from the cattle which cropped the greensward on its grassy slopes. There the hero built an altar in honour of Zeus the Deliverer, who had delivered him from the great flood. The mountain on which he is said to have alighted is probably the table-mountain, now called Phouka, whose broad flat top towers high above the neighbouring hills and forms a conspicuous landmark viewed from the plain of Argos.
The Megarians told how in Deucalion's flood Megarus, son of Zeus, escaped by swimming to the top of Mount Gerania, being guided by the cries of some cranes, which flew over the rising waters and from which the mountain afterwards received its new name.
According to Aristotle, writing in the fourth century B.C., the ravages of the deluge in Deucalion's time were felt most sensibly "in ancient Hellas, which is the country about Dodona and the river Achelous, for that river has changed its bed in many places. In those days the land was inhabited by the Selli and the people who were then called Greeks (Graikoi) but are now named Hellenes."
Some people thought that the sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona was founded by Deucalion and Pyrrha, who dwelt among the Molossians of that country In the fourth century B.C. Plato also mentions, without describing, the : flood which took place in the time of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and he represents the Egyptian priests as ridiculing the Greeks for believing that there had been only one deluge, whereas there had been many The Parian chronicler, who drew up his chronological table in the year 6 B.C., dated Deucalion's flood one thousand two hundred and sixty-five years before his own time; according to this calculation the cataclysm occurred in the year 9 B.C.
At a later age the Roman poet Ovid decked out the tradition of the great flood in the pinchbeck rhetoric which betrayed the decline of literary taste. He tells us that Jupiter, weary of the wickedness and impiety of the men of the Iron Age, resolved to destroy the whole of mankind at one fell swoop His first idea was to overwhelm them under the flaming thunderbolts which he brandished in his red right hand; but on reflection he laid these dangerous weapons aside, lest the upper air and heaven itself should catch fire from the great conflagration which they would kindle on earth ; and in this prudent resolution he was confirmed by an imperfect recollection of an old prophecy that the whole world, sky and earth alike, was destined to perish in a grand and final combustion.
Accordingly he decided on the safer course of turning on the celestial taps and drowning the whole wicked race under the tremendous shower bath So he shut up the North Wind in the cave of Aeolus, to prevent him from sweeping the murky clouds from the blue sky, and he let loose the South Wind, who flew abroad, rigged out in all the stage properties calculated to strike terror into the beholder He flapped his dripping wings: his dreadful face was veiled in pitchy blackness : mists sat on his forehead, his beard was soaking wet, and water ran down from his hoary hair In his train the sky lowered, thunder crashed, and the rainbow shone in spangled glory against the dark rain-clouds.
To help the sky-god in his onslaught on mankind his sea-blue brother Neptune summoned an assembly of the rivers and bade them roll in flood over the land, while he himself fetched the earth a swashing blow with his trident, causing it to quake like a jelly.
The fountains of the great deep were now opened. The deluge poured over the fields and meadows, whirling away trees, cattle, men and houses. Far and wide nothing was to be seen but a shoreless sea of tossing, turbid water. The farmer now rowed in a shallop over the field where he had lately guided the oxen at the plough-tail, and peering down he could discern his crops and the roof of his farmhouse submerged under the waves. He dropped his anchor on a green meadow, his keel grated on his own vineyard, and he fished for trout in the tops of the tall elms. Seals now lolled and sprawled where goats had lately nibbled the herbage, and dolphins gambolled and plunged in the woods.
When at last nothing remained above the waste of waters but the two peaks of Parnassus, toppling over the heaving billows and reaching up above the clouds, Deucalion and his wife drifted in a little boat to the mountain, and landing adored the nymphs of the Corycian cave and the prophetic goddess Themis, who managed the business of the oracle before if was taken over by Apollo. A righteous and godfearing man was Deucalion, and his wife was just such another.
Touched with compassion at the sight of the honest pair, the sole survivors of so many thousands, Jupiter now dispersed the clouds and the deluge, revealing the blue sky and the green earth to each other once more. So Neptune also laid aside his trident, and summoning the bugler Triton, his back blue with the growth of the purple-shell, he ordered him to sound the "Retire." The bugler obeyed, and putting the shell to his lips he blew from his puffed cheeks such a blast that at the sound of it all the waves and rivers fell back and left the land high and dry. This was all very well, but what were Deucalion and Pyrrha to do now, left solitary in a desolate world, where not a sound broke the dreadful silence save the melancholy lapping of the waves on the lonely shore?
They shed some natural tears, and then wiping them away they resolved to consult the oracle. So, pacing sadly by the yellow turbid waters of the Cephisus, they repaired to the temple of the goddess. : The sacred edifice presented a melancholy spectacle, its walls still overgrown with moss and sea-weed, its courts still deep in slime; and naturally no fire flamed or smouldered on the defiled altars. However, the goddess was fortunately at home, and in reply to the anxious inquiries of the two suppliants she instructed them, as soon as they had quitted the temple, to veil their heads, unloose their robes, and throw behind their backs the bones of their great parent. This strange answer bewildered them, and for a long time they remained silent. Pyrrha was the first to find her voice, and when at last she broke silence it was to declare respectfully but firmly that nothing would induce her to insult her mother's ghost by flinging her bones about.
Her husband, more discerning, said that perhaps by their great parent the goddess meant them to understand the earth, and that by her bones she signified the rocks and stones embedded in the ground. They were not very hopeful of success, but nothing else occurring to them to do, they decided to make the attempt. So they carried out the instructions of the oracle to the letter, and sure enough the stones which Deucalion threw turned into men, and the stones which Pyrrha threw turned into women. Thus was the earth repeopled after the great flood
Anyone who compares the laboured ingenuity of this account of the deluge with the majestic simplicity of the corresponding narrative in Genesis is in a position to measure the gulf which divides great literature from its tinsel imitation.
In his account of the catastrophe Ovid so far followed ancient Greek tradition as to represent Deucalion and Pyrrha landing on the peak of Parnassus. Later Roman writers carried the pair much further afield; one of them landed the voyagers on Mount Athos, and another conveyed them as far as Mount Etna.
Various places in Greece, as we have seen, claimed the honour of having been associated in a particular manner with Deucalion and the great flood. Among the claimants, as might have been expected, were the Athenians, who, pluming themselves on the vast antiquity from which they had inhabited the land of Attica, had no mind to be left out in the cold when it came to a question of Deucalion and the deluge. They annexed him accordingly by the simple expedient of alleging that when the clouds gathered dark on Parnassus and the rain came down in torrents on Lycorea where Deucalion reigned as king, he fled for safety to Athens, and on his arrival founded a sanctuary of Rainy Zeus, and offered thank-offerings for his escape.
In this brief form of the legend there is no mention of a ship, and we seem to be left to infer that the hero escaped on foot. Be that as it may, he is said to have founded the old sanctuary of Olympian Zeus and to have been buried in the city. Down to the second century of our era the local Athenian guides pointed with patriotic pride to the grave of the Greek Noah near the later and far statelier temple of Olympian Zeus, whose ruined columns, towering in solitary grandeur above the modern city, still attract the eye from far, and bear silent but eloquent witness to the glories of ancient Greece
Nor was this all that the guides had to show in memory of the tremendous cataclysm. Within the great precinct overshadowed by the vast temple of Olympian Zeus they led the curious traveller to a smaller precinct of Olympian Earth, where they pointed to a cleft in the ground a cubit wide. Down that cleft, they assured him, the waters of the deluge ran away, and down it every year they threw cakes of wheaten meal kneaded with honey. These cakes would seem to have been soul-cakes destined for the consumption of the poor souls who perished in the great flood ; for we know that a commemoration service or requiem mass was celebrated every year at Athens in their honour. It was called the Festival of the Water-bearing, which suggests that charitable people not only threw cakes but poured water down the cleft in the ground to slake the thirst as well as to stay the hunger of the ghosts in the nether world.
Another place where the great flood was commemorated by a similar ceremony was Hierapolis on the Euphrates. There down to the second century of our era the ancient Semitic deities were worshipped in the old way under a transparent disguise imposed on them, like modern drapery on ancient statues, by the nominally Greek civilization which the conquests of Alexander had spread over the. East. Chief among these aboriginal divinities was the great Syrian goddess Astarte, who to her Greek worshippers masqueraded under the name of Hera. Lucian has bequeathed to us a very valuable description of the sanctuary and the strange rites performed in it He tells us that according to the general opinion the sanctuary was founded by Deucalion, in whose time the great flood took place This gives Lucian occasion to relate the Greek story of the deluge, which according to him ran as follows. The present race of men, he says, are not the first of human kind ; there was another race which perished wholly. We are of the second breed, which multiplied after the time of Deucalion As for the folk before the flood, it is said that they were exceedingly wicked and lawless; for they neither kept their oaths, nor gave hospitality to strangers, nor respected suppliants, wherefore the great calamity befell them.
So the fountains of the deep were opened, and the rain descended in torrents, the rivers swelled, and the sea spread far over the land, till there was nothing but water, water everywhere, and all men perished. But Deucalion was the only man who, by reason of his prudence and piety, survived and formed the link between the first and the second race of men ; and the way in which he was saved was this. He had a great ark, and into it he entered with his wives and children ; and as he was entering there came to him pigs, and horses, and lions, and serpents, and all other land animals, all of them in pairs He received them all, and they did him no harm; nay, by God's help there was a great friendship between them, and they all sailed in one ark so long as the flood prevailed on the earth.
Such says Lucian, is the Greek story of Deucalion's deluge ; but the people of Hierapolis, he goes on, tell a marvellous thing. They say that a great chasm opened in their country, and all the water of the flood ran away down it.
And when that happened, Deucalion built altars and founded a holy temple of Hera beside the chasm. "I have seen the chasm," he proceeds, " and a very small one it is under the temple. Whether it was large of old and has been reduced to its present size in course of time, I know not, but what I saw is undoubtedly small. In memory of this legend they perform the following ceremony ; twice a year water is brought from the sea to the temple. It is brought not by the priests only, but by all Syria and Arabia, by and from beyond the Euphrates many men go to the sea, and all of them bring water. The water is poured into the chasm, and though the chasm is small yet it receives a mighty deal of water. In doing this they say that they comply with the custom which Deucalion instituted in the sanctuary for a memorial at once of calamity and of mercy."
Moreover, at the north gate of the great temple there stood two tall columns, or rather obelisks, each about three hundred and sixty feet high ; and twice a year a man used to ascend one of them and remain for seven days in that airy situation on the top of the obelisk. Opinions differed as to why he went there, and what he did up aloft. Most people thought that at that great height he was within hail of the gods in heaven, who were near enough to hear distinctly the prayers which he offered on behalf of the whole land of Syria. Others, however, opined that he clambered up the obelisk to signify how men had ascended to the tops of mountains and of tall trees in order to escape from the waters of Deucalion's flood
In this late Greek version of the deluge legend the resemblances to the Babylonian version are sufficiently close ; and a still nearer trait is supplied by Plutarch, who says that Deucalion let loose a dove from the ark in order to judge by its return or its flight whether the storm still continued or had abated. In this form the Greek legend of the great flood was unquestionably coloured, if not moulded, by Semitic influence, whether the colours and the forms were imported from Israel or from Babylon.
But Hierapolis on the Euphrates was not the only place in Western Asia which Greek tradition associated with the deluge of Deucalion There was, we are told, a certain Nannacus, king of Phrygia, who lived before the time of Deucalion, and, foreseeing the coming catastrophe, gathered his people into the sanctuaries, there to weep and pray. Hence "the age of Nannacus" became a proverbial expression for great antiquity or loud lamentations According to another account Nannacus or Annacus, the Phrygian, lived over three hundred years, and when his neighbours, apparently tired of the old man, inquired of the oracle how much longer he might be expected to live, they received the discouraging reply that when the patriarch died, all men would perish with him So the Phrygians lamented bitterly, which gave rise to the old proverb about "weeping for Nannacus." The Greek satyric poet Herodas puts the proverb in the mouth of a mother, who brings her brat to the schoolmaster to receive a richly deserved thrashing; and in so doing she refers sorrowfully to the cruel necessity she was under of paying the school fees, even though she were to "weep like Nannacus."
When the deluge had swept away the whole race of mankind, and the earth had dried up again, Zeus commanded Prometheus and Athena to fashion images of mud, and then summoning the winds he bade them breathe into the mud images and make them live So the place was called Iconium after the images (eikones) which were made there. Some have thought that the patriarchal Nannacus or Annacus was no other than the Biblical Enoch or Hanoch, who lived before the flood for three hundred and sixty-five years and was then removed from the world in a mysterious fashion But against this identification it is to be said that the name Nannacus would seem to be genuine Greek, since it occurs in Greek inscriptions of the island of Cos
Another city of Asia Minor which appears to have boasted of its connexion with the great flood was Apamea Cibotos in Phrygia The surname of Cibotos, which the city assumed, is the Greek word for chest or ark ; and on coins of the city, minted in the reigns of Severus, Macrinus, and Philip the Elder, we see the ark floating on water with two passengers in it, whose figures appear from the waist upwards ; beside the ark two other human figures, one male and the other female, are represented standing; and lastly, on the top of the chest are perched two birds, one of them said to be a raven and the other a dove carrying an olive-branch. As if to remove all doubt as to the identification of the legend, the name Noe, the Greek equivalent of Noah, is inscribed on the ark. No doubt, the two human figures represent Noah and his wife twice over, first in the ark, and afterwards outside of it. These coin types prove unquestionably that in the third century of our era the people of Apamea were acquainted with the Hebrew tradition of the Noachian deluge in the form in which the story is narrated in the Book of Genesis.
They may easily have learned it from their Jewish fellow-citizens, who in the first century before our era were so numerous or so wealthy that on one occasion they contributed no less than a hundred pounds weight of gold to be sent as an offering to Jerusalem Whether at Apamea the tradition of the deluge was purely Jewish in origin, or whether it was grafted upon an old native legend of a great flood, is a question on which scholars are not agreed Though the deluge associated with the name of Deucalion was the most familiar and famous, it was not the only one recorded by Greek tradition Learned men, indeed, distinguished between three such great catastrophes, which had befallen the world at different epochs The first, we are told, took place in the time of Ogyges, the second in the time of Deucalion, and the third in the time of Dardanus. Ogyges or Ogygus, as the name is also spelled, is said to have founded and reigned over Thebes in Boeotia, which, according to the learned Varro, was the oldest city in Greece, having been built in antediluvian times before the earliest of all the floods. The connexion of Ogyges with Boeotia in general and with Thebes in particular is further vouched for by the name Ogygian which was bestowed on the land, on the city, and on one of its gates.
Yet the Athenians, jealous of the superior antiquity which this tradition assigned to their hated rival, claimed the ancient Boeotian hero as an aboriginal of their country;l one tradition describes Ogyges as a king of Attica, and another represents him as the founder and king of Eleusis. So great was the devastation wrought in Attica by the flood that the country remained without kings from the time of Ogyges down to the reign of Cecrops. If we may trust the description of a rhetorical poet, the whole earth was submerged by the deluge, even the lofty peaks of Thessaly were covered, and the snowy top of Parnassus itself was lashed by the snowy billows. With regard to the date of the catastrophe, some writers of antiquity profess to give us more or less exact information. The learned Roman scholar Varro tells us that the Boeotian Thebes was built about two thousand one hundred years before the time when he was writing, which was in or about the year 6 B.C.; and as the deluge, according to him, took place in the lifetime of Ogyges but after he had founded Thebes, we infer that in Varro's opinion the great flood occurred in or soon after the year 6 B.C. Still more precise is the statement of Julius Africanus, a Christian author who drew up a chronicle of the world from the Creation down to the year A.D. He affirms that the deluge of Ogyges happened just one thousand and twenty years before the first Olympiad, from which the Greeks dated their exact reckoning ; and as the first Olympiad fell in the year 776 B.C., we arrive at the year 796 B.C. as the date to which the Christian chronicler referred the great Ogygian flood. It happened, he tells us, in the reign of Phoroneus, king of Argos.
He adds for our further information that Ogyges, who survived the deluge to which he gave his name, was a contemporary of Moses and flourished about the time when that great prophet led the children of Israel out of Egypt; and he clinches his chain of evidence by observing that at a time when God was visiting the land of Egypt with hailstorms and other plagues, it was perfectly natural that distant parts of the earth should simultaneously" feel the effects of the divine anger, and in particular it was just and right that Attica should smart beneath the rod, since according to some people, including the historian Theopompus, the Athenians were in fact colonists from Egypt and therefore shared the guilt of the mother-country According to the Church historian Eusebius, the great flood in the time of Ogyges occurred about two thousand two hundred years after the Noachian deluge and two hundred and fifty years before the similar catastrophe in the days of Deucalion It would seem indeed to have been a point of honour with the early Christians to claim for the flood recorded in their sacred books an antiquity far more venerable than that of any flood described in mere profane writings We have seen that Julius Africanus depresses Ogyges from the age of Noah to that of Moses; and Isidore, the learned bishop of Seville at the beginning of the seventh century, heads his list of floods with the Noachian deluge, while the second and third places in order of time are assigned to the floods of Ogyges and Deucalion respectively; according to him, Ogyges was a contemporary of the patriarch Jacob, while Deucalion lived in the days of Moses. The bishop was, so far as I am aware, the first of many writers who have appealed to fossil shells imbedded in remote mountains as witnesses to the truth of the Noachian tradition
If Ogyges was originally, as seems probable, a Boeotian rather than an Attic hero, the story of the deluge in his time may well have been suggested by the vicissitudes of the Copaic Lake which formerly occupied a large part of Central Boeotia For, having no outlet above ground, the lake depended for its drainage entirely on subterranean passages or chasms which the water had hollowed out for itself in the course of ages through the limestone rock, and according as these passages were clogged or cleared the level of the lake rose or fell. In no lake, perhaps, have the annual changes been more regular and marked than in the Copaic ; for while in winter it was a reedy mere, the haunt of thousands of wild fowl, in summer it was a more or less marshy plain, where cattle browsed and crops were sown and reaped. So well recognized were the vicissitudes of the seasons that places on the bank of the lake such as Orchomenus, Lebadea, and Copae, had summer roads and winter roads by which they communicated with each other, the winter roads following the sides of the hills, while the summer roads struck across the plain. With the setting in of the heavy autumnal rains in November the lake began to rise and reached its greatest depth in February or March, by which time the mouths of the emissories were completely submerged and betrayed their existence only by swirls on the surface of the mere. Yet even then the lake presented to the eye anything but an unbroken sheet of water.
Viewed from a height, such as the acropolis of Orchomenus, it appeared as an immense fen, of a vivid green colour, stretching away for miles and miles, overgrown with sedge, reeds, and canes, through which the river Cephisus or Melas might be seen sluggishly oozing, while here and there a gleam of sunlit water, especially towards the north-east corner of the mere, directed the eye to what looked like ponds in the vast green swamp. Bare grey mountains on the north and east, and the beautiful wooded slopes of Helicon on the south, bounded the fen. In spring the water began to sink. Isolated brown patches, where no reeds grew, were the first to show as islands in the mere; and as the season advanced they expanded more and more till they met. By the middle of summer great stretches, especially in the middle and at the edges, were bare. In the higher parts the fat alluvial soil left by the retiring waters was sown by the peasants and produced crops of corn, rice, and cotton ; while the lower parts, overgrown by rank grass and weeds, were grazed by herds of cattle and swine. In the deepest places of all, the water often stagnated the whole summer, though there were years when it retreated even from these, leaving behind it only a bog or perhaps a stretch of white clayey soil, perfectly dry, which the summer heat seamed with a network of minute cracks and fissures. By the end of August the greater part of the basin was generally dry, though the water did not reach its lowest point till October. At that time what had lately been a fen was only a great brown expanse, broken here and there by a patch of green marsh, where reeds and other water-plants grew. In November the lake began to fill again fast.
Such was the ordinary annual cycle of changes in the Copaic Lake in modern times, and we have no reason to suppose that it was essentially different in antiquity. But at all times the water of the lake has been liable to be raised above or depressed below its customary level by unusually heavy or scanty rainfall in winter or by the accidental clogging or opening of the chasms. As we read in ancient authors of drowned cities on the margin of the lake, so a modern traveller tells of villagers forced to flee before the rising flood, and of vineyards and corn-fields seen under water One such inundation, more extensive and destructive than any of its predecessors, may have been associated ever after with the name of Ogyges.
Among the dead cities whose ruins are scattered in and around the wide plain that was once the Copaic Lake, none is more remarkable or excites our curiosity more keenly than one which bears the modern name of Goulas or Gla Its ancient name and history are alike unknown : even legend is silent on the subject.
The extensive remains occupy the broad summit of a low rocky hill or tableland which rises abruptly on all sides from the dead flat of the surrounding country When the lake was full, the place must have been an island, divided by about a mile of shallow and weedy water from the nearest point in the line of cliffs which formed the eastern shore of the lake A fortification wall, solidly built of roughly squared blocks of stone, encircles the whole edge of the tableland, and is intersected by four gates flanked by towers of massive masonry.
Within the fortress are the ruins of other structures, including the remains of a great palace constructed in the style, though not on the plan, of the prehistoric palaces of Mycenae and Tiryns The fortress and palace of Gla would seem to have been erected in the Mycenaean age by a people akin in civilization, if not in race, to the builders of Tiryns and Mycenae, though less skilled in the science of military engineering; for the walls do not exhibit the enormous stones of Tiryns, and the gates are arranged on a plan far less formidable to an assailant than the gates of the two Argive citadels.
The scanty remains of pottery and other domestic furniture on the plateau appear to indicate that it was occupied only for a short time, and the traces of fire on the palace point to the conclusion that its end was sudden and violent Everything within the place bears the imprint of a single plan and a single period : there is no trace of an earlier or a later settlement Created at a blow, it would seem to have perished at a blow and never to have been inhabited again In its solitude and silence, remote from all human habitations, looking out from its grey old walls over the vast Copaic plain to the distant mountains which bound the horizon on all sides, this mysterious fortress is certainly one of the most impressive sights in Greece.
Can it be that this ancient and forgotten town, once lapped on all sides by the waters of the Copaic Lake, was the home of the legendary Ogyges, and that he forsook it, perhaps in consequence of an inundation, to migrate to the higher and drier site which was afterwards known as Thebes ? The hypothesis would go some way to explain the legends which gathered round his memory ; but it is no more than a simple guess, and as such I venture to hazard it.
The theory which would explain the great flood of Ogyges by an extraordinary inundation of the Copaic Lake, is to some extent supported by an Arcadian parallel. We have seen that in Greek legend the third great deluge was associated with the name of Dardanus. Now according to one account, Dardanus at first reigned as a king in Arcadia, but was driven out of the country by a great flood, which submerged the lowlands and rendered them for a long time unfit for cultivation. The inhabitants retreated to the mountains, and for a while made shift to live as best they might on such food as they could procure ; but at last, concluding that the land left by the water was not sufficient to support them all, they resolved to part; some of them remained in the country with Dimas, son of Dardanus, for their king ; while the rest emigrated under the leadership of Dardanus himself to the island of Samothrace.
According to a Greek tradition, which the Roman Varro accepted, the birthplace of Dardanus was Pheneus in north Arcadia The place is highly significant, for, if we except the Copaic area, no valley in Greece is known to have been from antiquity subject to inundations on so vast a scale and for such long periods as the valley of Pheneus.
The natural conditions in the two regions are substantially alike. Both are basins in a limestone country without any outflow above ground : both receive the rain water which pours into them from the surrounding mountains : both are drained by subterranean channels which the water has worn or which earthquakes have opened through the rock ; and whenever these outlets are silted up or otherwise closed, what at other times is a plain becomes converted for the time being into a lake.
But with these substantial resemblances are combined some striking differences between the two landscapes. For while the Copaic basin is a vast stretch of level ground little above sea-level and bounded only by low cliffs or gentle slopes, the basin of Pheneus is a narrow upland valley closely shut in on every side by steep frowning mountains, their upper slopes clothed with dark pine woods and their lofty summits capped with snow for many months of the year. The river which drains the basin through an underground channel is the Ladon, the most romantically beautiful of all the rivers of Greece. Milton's fancy dwelt on "sanded Ladon's lilied banks"; even the prosaic Pausanias exclaimed that there was no fairer river either in Greece or in foreign lands; and among the memories which I brought back from Greece I recall none with more delight than those of the days I spent in tracing the river from its birthplace in the lovely lake, first to its springs on the far side of the mountain, and then down the deep wooded gorge through which it hurries, brawling and tumbling over rocks in sheets of greenish-white foam, to join the sacred Alpheus. Now the passage by which the Ladon makes its way underground from the valley of Pheneus has been from time to time blocked by an earthquake, with the result that the river has ceased to flow. When I was at the springs of the Ladon in 89, I learned from a peasant on the spot that three years before, after a violent shock of earthquake, the water ceased to run for three hours, the chasm at the bottom of the pool was exposed, and fish were seen lying on the dry ground. After three hours the spring began to flow a little, and three days later there was a loud explosion, and the water burst forth in immense volume. Similar stoppages of the river have been reported both in ancient and modern times ; and whenever the obstruction has been permanent, the valley of Pheneus has been occupied by a lake varying in extent and depth with the more or less complete stoppage of the subterranean outlet.
According to Pliny there had been down to his day five changes in the condition of the valley from wet to dry and from dry to wet, all of them caused by earthquakes In Plutarch's time the flood rose so high that the whole valley was under water, which pious folk attributed to the somewhat belated wrath of Apollo at Hercules, who had stolen the god's prophetic tripod from Delphi and carried it off to Pheneus about a thousand years before However, later in the same century the waters had again subsided, for the Greek traveller Pausanias found the bottom of the valley to be dry land, and knew of the former existence of the lake only by tradition At the beginning of the nineteenth century the basin was a swampy plain, for the most part covered with fields of wheat or barley But shortly after the expulsion of the Turks, through neglect of the precautions which the Turkish governor had taken to keep the mouth of the subterranean outlet open, the channel became blocked, the water, no longer able to escape, rose in its bed, and by 80 it formed a deep lake about five miles long by five miles wide. And a broad lake of greenish-blue water it still was when I saw it in the autumn of 89,with the pine-clad mountains descending steeply in rocky declivities or sheer precipices to the water's edge, except for a stretch of level ground on the north, where the luxuriant green of vineyards and maize-fields contrasted pleasingly with the blue of the lake and the sombre green of the pines. The whole scene presented rather the aspect of a Swiss than of a Greek landscape. A few years later and the scene was changed. Looking down into the valley from a pass on a July afternoon, a more recent traveller beheld, instead of an expanse of sea-blue water, a blaze of golden corn with here and there a white point of light showing where a fustanella'd reaper was at his peaceful toil The lake had disappeared, perhaps for ever ; for we are told that measures have now been taken to keep the subterranean outlets permanently open, and so to preserve for the corn the ground which has been won from the water.
A permanent mark of the height to which the lake of Pheneus attained in former days and at which, to all appearance, it must have stood for many ages, is engraved on the sides of the mountains which enclose the basin. It is a sharply drawn line running round the contour of the mountains at a uniform level of not less than a hundred and fifty feet above the bottom of the valley. The trees and shrubs extend down the steep slopes to this line and there stop abruptly. Below the line the rock is of a light-yellow colour and almost bare of vegetation ; above the line the rock is of a much darker colour. The attention of travellers has been drawn to this conspicuous mark from antiquity to the present day. The ancient traveller Pausanias noticed it in the second century of our era, and he took it to indicate the line to which the lake rose at the time of its highest flood, when the city of Pheneus was submerged.
This interpretation has been questioned by some modern writers, but there seems to be little real doubt that the author of the oldest extant guide-book to Greece was substantially right; except that the extremely sharp definition of the line and its permanence for probably much more than two thousand years appear to point to a long-continued persistence of the lake at this high level rather than to a mere sudden and temporary rise in a time of inundation. " It is evident," says the judicious traveller Dodwell, " that a temporary inundation could not effect so striking a difference in the superficies of the rock, the colour of which must have been changed from that of the upper parts by the concreting deposit of many ages."
In a valley which has thus suffered so many alternations between wet and dry, between a broad lake of sea-blue water and broad acres of yellow corn, the traditions of great floods cannot be lightly dismissed ; on the contrary everything combines to confirm their probability. The story, therefore, that Dardanus, a native of Pheneus, was compelled to emigrate by a great inundation which swamped the lowlands, drowned the fields, and drove the inhabitants to the upper slopes of the mountains, may well rest on a solid foundation of fact. And the same may be true of the flood recorded by Pausanias, which rose and submerged the ancient city of Pheneus at the northern end of the lake.
From his home in the highlands of Arcadia, the emigrant Dardanus is said to have made his way to the island of Samothrace According to one account, he floated thither on a raft; but according to another version of the legend, the great flood overtook him, not in Arcadia, but in Samothrace, and he escaped on an inflated skin, drifting on the face of the waters till he landed on Mount Ida, where he founded Dardania or Troy. Certainly, the natives of Samothrace, who were great sticklers for their antiquity, claimed to have had a deluge of their own before any other nation on earth. They said that the sea rose and covered a great part of the flat land in their island, and that the survivors retreated to the lofty mountains which still render Samothrace one of the most conspicuous features in the northern Aegean and are plainly visible in clear weather from Troy.
As the sea still pursued them in their retreat, they prayed to the gods to deliver them, and on being saved they set up landmarks of their salvation all round the island and built altars on which they continued to sacrifice down to later ages. And many centuries after the great flood fishermen still occasionally drew up in their nets the stone capitals of columns, which told of cities drowned in the depths of the sea.
The causes which the Samothracians alleged for the inundation were very remarkable. The catastrophe happened, according to them, not through a heavy fall of rain, but through a sudden and extraordinary rising of the sea occasioned by the bursting of the barriers which till then had divided the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. At that time the enormous volume of water dammed up behind these barriers broke bounds, and cleaving for itself a. passage through the opposing land created the straits which are now known as the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, through which the waters of the Black Sea have ever since flowed into the Mediterranean. When the tremendous torrent first rushed through the new opening in the dam, it washed over a great part of the coast of Asia, as well as the flat lands of Samothrace.
Now this Samothracian tradition is to some extent confirmed by modern geology. "At no very distant period," we are told, "the land of Asia Minor was continuous with that of Europe, across the present site of the Bosphorus, forming a barrier several hundred feet high, which dammed up the waters of the Black Sea. A vast extent of eastern Europe and of western central Asia thus became a huge reservoir, the lowest part of the lip of which was probably situated somewhat more than 00 feet above the sea-level, along the present southern watershed of the Obi, which flows into the Arctic Ocean. Into this basin, the largest rivers of Europe, such as the Danube and the Volga, and what were then great rivers of Asia, the Oxus and Jaxartes, with all the intermediate affluents, poured their waters. In addition, it received the overflow of Lake Balkash, then much larger ; and, probably, that of the inland sea of Mongolia. At that time, the level of the Sea of Aral stood at least 60 feet higher than it does at present. Instead of the separate Black, Caspian, and Aral seas, there was one vast Ponto-Aralian Mediterranean, which must have been prolonged into arms and fiords along the lower valleys of the Danube, and the Volga (in the course of which Caspian shells are now found as far as the Kuma), the Ural, and the other affluent rivers—-while it seems to have sent its overflow, northward, through the present basin of the Obi."
This enormous reservoir or vast inland sea, bounded and held up by a high natural dam joining Asia Minor to the Balkan Peninsula, appears to have existed down to the Pleistocene period ; and the erosion of the Dardanelles, by which the pent-up waters at last found their way into the Mediterranean, is believed to have taken place towards the end of the Pleistocene period or later But man is now known for certain to have inhabited Europe in the Pleistocene period; some hold that he inhabited it in the Pliocene or even the Miocene period. Hence it seems possible that the inhabitants of Eastern Europe should have preserved a traditional memory of the vast inland Ponto-Aralian sea and of its partial desiccation through the piercing of the dam which divided it from the Mediterranean, in other words, through the opening of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. If that were so, the Samothracian tradition might be allowed to contain a large element of historical truth in regard to the causes assigned for the catastrophe.
On the other hand geology seems to lend no support to the tradition of the catastrophe itself. For the evidence tends to prove that the strait of the Dardanelles was not opened suddenly, like the bursting of a dam, either by the pressure of the water or the shock of an earthquake, but that on the contrary it was created gradually by a slow process of erosion which must have lasted for many centuries or even thousands of years ; for the strait "is bounded by undisturbed Pleistocene strata forty feet thick, through which, to all appearance, the present passage has been quietly cut." Thus the lowering of the level of the Ponto-Aralian sea to that of the Mediterranean can hardly have been sudden and catastrophic, accompanied by a vast inundation of the Asiatic and European coasts ; more probably it was effected so slowly and gradually that the total amount accomplished even in a generation would be imperceptible to ordinary observers or even to close observers unprovided with instruments of precision.
Hence, instead of assuming that Samothracian tradition preserved a real memory of a widespread inundation consequent on the opening of the Dardanelles, it seems safer to suppose that this story of a great flood is nothing but the guess of some early philosopher, who rightly divined the origin of the straits without being able to picture to himself the extreme slowness of the process by which nature had excavated them.
As a matter of fact, the eminent physical philosopher Strata, who succeeded Theophrastus as head of the Peripatetic school in 87 B.C., actually maintained this view on purely theoretical grounds, not alleging it as a tradition which had been handed down from antiquity, but arguing in its favour from his observations of the natural features of the Black Sea. He pointed to the vast quantities of mud annually washed down by great rivers into the Euxine, and he inferred that but for the outlet of the Bosphorus the basin of that sea would in time be silted up. Further, he conjectured that in former times the same rivers had forced for themselves a passage through the Bosphorus, allowing their collected waters to escape first to the Propontis, and then from it through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean. Similarly he thought that the Mediterranean had been of old an inland sea, and that its junction with the Atlantic was effected by the dammed up water cutting for itself an opening through the Straits of Gibraltar.
Accordingly we may conclude that the cause which the Samothracians alleged for the great flood was derived from an ingenious speculation rather than from an ancient tradition.
There are some grounds for thinking that the flood story which the Greeks associated with the names of Deucalion and Pyrrha may in like manner have been, not so much a reminiscence of a real event, as an inference founded on the observation of certain physical facts We have seen that in one account the mountains of Thessaly are said to have been parted by the deluge in Deucalion's time, and that in another account the ark, with Deucalion in it, is reported to have drifted to Mount Othrys in Thessaly.
These references seem to indicate Thessaly as the original seat of the legend; and the indication is greatly strengthened by the view which the ancients took of the causes that had moulded the natural features of the country Thus Herodotus relates a tradition that in ancient times Thessaly was a great lake or inland sea, shut in on all sides by the lofty mountains of Ossa and Pelion, Olympus, Pindus, and Othrys, through which there was as yet no opening to allow the pent-up waters of the rivers to escape Afterwards, according to the Thessalians, the sea-god Poseidon, who causes earthquakes, made an outlet for the lake through the mountains, by cleaving the narrow gorge of Tempe, through which the river Peneus has ever since drained the Thessalian plain. The pious historian intimates his belief in the truth of this local tradition. "Whoever believes," says he, that Poseidon shakes the earth, and that chasms caused by earthquakes are his handiwork, would say, on seeing the gorge of the Peneus, that Poseidon had made it. For the separation of the mountains, it seems to me, is certainly the effect of an earthquake." The view of the father of history was substantially accepted by later writers of antiquity, though one of them would attribute the creation of the gorge and the drainage of the lake to the hero Hercules, among whose beneficent labours for the good of mankind the construction of waterworks on a gigantic scale was commonly reckoned. More cautious or more philosophical authors contented themselves with referring the origin of the defile to a simple earthquake, without expressing any opinion as to the god or hero who may have set the tremendous disturbance in motion.
Yet we need not wonder that popular opinion in this matter should incline to the theory of divine or heroic agency, for in truth the natural features of the pass of Tempe are well fitted to impress the mind with a religious awe, with a sense of vast primordial forces which, by the gigantic scale of their operations, present an overwhelming contrast to the puny labours of man. The traveller who descends at morning into the deep gorge from the west, may see, far above him, the snows of Olympus flushed with a golden glow under the beams of the rising sun, but as he pursues the path downwards the summits of the mountains disappear from view, and he is confronted on either hand only by a stupendous wall of mighty precipices shooting up in prodigious grandeur and approaching each other in some places so near that they almost seem to meet, barely leaving room for the road and river at their foot, and for a strip of blue sky overhead. The cliffs on the side of Olympus, which the traveller has constantly before his eyes, since the road runs on the south or right bank of the river, are indeed the most magnificent and striking in Greece, and in rainy weather they are rendered still more impressive by the waterfalls that pour down their sides to swell the smooth and steady current of the stream.
The grandeur of the scenery culminates about the middle of the pass, where an enormous crag rears its colossal form high in air, its soaring summit crowned with the ruins of a Roman castle. Yet the sublimity of the landscape is tempered and softened by the richness and verdure of the vegetation. In some parts of the defile the cliffs recede sufficiently to leave little grassy flats at their foot, where thickets of evergreens _the laurel, the myrtle, the wild olive, the arbutus, the agnus castus—are festooned with wild vines and ivy, and variegated with the crimson bloom of the oleander and the yellow gold of the jasmine and laburnum, while the air is perfumed by the luscious odours of masses of aromatic plants and flowers. Even in the narrowest places the river bank is overshadowed by spreading plane-trees, which stretch their roots and dip their pendent boughs into the stream, their dense foliage forming so thick a screen as almost to shut out the sun.
The scarred and fissured fronts of the huge cliffs themselves are tufted with dwarf oaks and shrubs, wherever these can find a footing, their verdure contrasting vividly with the bare white face of the limestone rock ; while breaks here and there in the mountain wall open up vistas of forests of great oaks and dark firs mantling the steep declivities The overarching shade and soft luxuriance of the vegetation strike the traveller all the more by contrast if he comes to the glen in hot summer weather after toiling through the dusty, sultry plains of Thessaly, without a tree to protect him from the fierce rays of the southern sun, without a breeze to cool his brow, and with little variety of hill and dale to relieve the dull monotony of the landscape No wonder that speculation should have early busied itself with the origin of this grand and beautiful ravine, and that primitive religion and science alike should have ascribed it to some great primeval cataclysm, some sudden and tremendous outburst of volcanic energy, rather than to its true cause, the gradual and agelong erosion of water.
Hence we may with some confidence conclude that the cleft in the Thessalian mountains, which is said to have been rent by Deucalion's flood, was no other than the gorge of Tempe. Indeed, without being very rash, we may perhaps go farther and conjecture that the story of the flood itself was suggested by the desire to explain the origin of the deep and narrow defile. For once men had pictured to themselves a great lake dammed in by the circle of the Thessalian mountains, the thought would naturally occur to them, what a vast inundation must have followed the bursting of the dam, when the released water, rushing in a torrent through the newly opened sluice, swept over the subjacent lowlands carrying havoc and devastation in its train! If there is any truth in this conjecture, the Thessalian story of Deucalion's flood and the Samothracian story of the flood of Dardanus stood exactly on the same footing : both were mere inferences drawn from the facts of physical geography : neither of them contained any reminiscences of actual events. In short, both were what Sir Edward Tylor has called myths of observation rather than historical traditions.