Jove’s Great Deluge

Author: Ovid

Time Period: 1 CE–500 CE

Country or Culture: Rome

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

The great sky god Jove looks down on the world and is furious, seeing nothing but mortals entangled in their selfish and wicked deeds. Turning to the other gods, he declares that it is not enough to simply slay the most sinful of the humans, but rather that they all must die. Some gods protest, insisting that without humans there will be no one to worship them and tend to their temples. Jove, however, is caught up in his rage, declaring that he will create new mortals who do not behave in such shameful ways.

At once, Jove begins to summon a massive flood. He decides not to use his thunderbolts, knowing that they might engulf the entire universe in flames, bringing even his own existence to an end. Instead, he hides away all winds but the south wind, which gathers up moisture and pours rain down onto the earth, and great streams rush from Jove’s scowling face. As storms batter fields and cities, Jove calls on Neptune, the god of the ocean, to join him. Neptune and the gods of the rivers strike the earth with all their force, unleashing their full power so that water rushes over every bit of land; even the greatest mansions and towers are taken by the violent tides. In little time, the earth is a scene of pure chaos, men clinging to the highest branches while lions and tigers wash by and dolphins are battered against the trunks of trees. With nothing but shoreless and violent ocean, nearly all mortals quickly perish.

Amid this chaos, however, the heights of Mount Parnassus on Phocis still rise, and two surviving people, Deucalion and Pyrrha, slowly row their boat up to the standing temple there. There, they immediately begin their worship of the nymphs, the mountain, and the goddess Themis.

When Jove sees these two good and just mortals, he calls off the storms. He forces the clouds and the rivers to retreat, allowing the sun to shine once more and the earth, slowly, to be exposed again. On the drying earth, Deucalion and Pyrrha are overtaken by grief, lamenting their fate to one another and questioning what their role might be as the only survivors of a lost world. Being pious people, they turn to the oracles, arriving at the nearest temple and asking Themis for guidance, hoping to learn how they might bring about other mortals once more. The oracle tells them that they must depart from the temple, remove their clothes, and toss the bones of their mother behind them. While Pyrrha at first despairs at disrespecting her mother so, Deucalion reminds her that an oracle would never instruct a wicked deed. In little time, they realize that their original mother is the earth and that her bones must be the stones at their feet. Leaving the temple, then, they scatter stones behind them, and as those stones hit the ground, they slowly expand and take on the soft and living form of humans, a trail of men behind Deucalion and women behind Pyrrha.

SIGNIFICANCE

Presented in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of the great deluge is one of the first major events in Roman mythology, setting the tone for the violent and irrational world that will emerge from the chaotic seas.

Ovid’s long poem is a foundational text in Western literature. Written in Latin, it chronicles Roman mythology from the creation of the universe up through Ovid’s present day, the reign of Julius Caesar. Through the text, Ovid brings together hundreds of influential myths from Greek and Roman mythology, offering thematic arcs that bring the disparate narratives together. Several core ideas emerge, including the importance of transformation in Roman culture and a heavy emphasis on love and violence as the animating forces of the world. Set at the core of the myths to follow, the story of the flood makes clear that in this violent and passionate existence, the gods themselves have little more rationality and self-control than humans.

Nothing, perhaps, makes this clearer than the extreme and willful actions of Jove, the king of the gods and supposedly a force of wisdom in the universe. Jove’s violent actions that begin this myth are rooted in the foolish mistakes of only a few humans, Jove having been treated with disrespect by a mortal who hosted the god and tried to murder Jove in his sleep. Deciding that this one action damns all of humanity, Jove ignores the advice of the other gods and the pleas of all mortals, destroying the earth and wiping out the beauty of his own creation. The scene of destruction is as violent as it is humorous, with Ovid finding some comic relief in the images of lions floating by stranded Romans and helpless men clinging to ropes. This comedy is not callous, but rather in line with the broader picture Ovid paints. Jove is an irrational god taken by a whim, and his frustration at being treated with disrespect results in a storm of world-ending destruction.

Readers should understand this as being supremely unjust to the mortals, just as a mortal had behaved unjustly to Jove. To make this hypocrisy clear, Ovid includes the pious mortals Deucalion—the son of Prometheus—and his wife, Pyrrha. Ignorant of the indulgent whims of the gods and pure in soul, they float in the great flood, hapless and trusting of a god who would destroy them for the sins of their neighbors. In some versions of the myth, Prometheus—who is credited with having created the first humans from clay—warns his son about the coming flood, giving Deucalion enough time to build a boat that will save him and his wife. Nevertheless, Deucalion and Pyrrha are still left to the whims of the gods.

Far from an instructive text praising the worth of the gods and demanding human devotion, then, Ovid provides us with a myth in which the universe itself is as uncaring and irrational as we could possibly imagine. It is a world, after all, where it seems possible that the gods would arbitrarily demand the desecration of Pyrrha’s mother in order to repopulate the earth. With this extreme example of destruction and death at its core, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is able to go on through the entirety of Roman mythology, showing again and again that the gods and universe they create is as fickle, emotional, and absurd as the mortals that inhabit it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bate, M. S. “Tempestuous Poetry: Storms in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Heroides, and Tristia.” Mnemosyne 57.3 (2004): 295–310. Print.

Fletcher, K. F. B. “Ovidian ‘Correction’ of the Biblical Flood?” Classical Philology 105.2 (2010): 209–13. Print.

Harrison, Stephen. “Bimillenary Ovid: Some Recent Versions of the Metamorphoses.” Translation & Literature 13.2 (2004): 251–67. Print.

Kline, A. S., trans. Metamorphoses. By Ovid. Ovid Collection. U of Virginia, 2000. Web. 9 Sept. 2013.

Mazzeno, Laurence W., ed. “Metamorphoses – Ovid.” Masterplots. 4th ed. Vol. 7. Pasadena: Salem, 2011. 3651–52. Print.

More, Brookes, trans. Metamorphoses. By Ovid. Boston: Cornhill, 1922. Print.