The Flood

Jupiter ruled the world for many hundreds of years. Then one day he began to wonder how the people on earth were getting along. Disguising himself as a human being, he went down to see for himself.

Everywhere Jupiter went he found trouble. People were greedy and jealous and quarrelsome. They no longer had any reverence for the gods.

Jupiter was so angry that he went back to Olympus determined to remove every single man and woman from the beautiful earth they had spoiled. He covered the whole sky with clouds and commanded the winds to whip and twist them. Into the whirling mass he sent the rain, and the rain poured down into the rivers and the sea and over all earth. The flood rose higher and higher.

The frightened people fled up the highest mountains, but the flood rose over the mountains. When at last the rain stopped, there were only two people left on earth. They were Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, who had climbed to the top of Mount Parnassus. Jupiter spared them because they were good.

When the sun dried the earth again, Deucalion and Pyrrha found a temple, half ruined and covered with wet moss. Here they thanked the gods for saving them and prayed that someone on Olympus would tell them what to do all alone on earth. A voice answered them from the temple. It told them to go down from the mountain and as they went, to throw stones ahead of them. Deucalion and Pyrrha did this, and as the stones fell, they changed slowly into men and women.

In this way, in the time the Greeks and Romans called the Stone Age, human beings came to live on earth again. This wonderful story in mythology is about these people, and their children, and their grandchildren, and the gods they lived with.