Deucalion
and Pyrrha leave it, offer sacrifice, and, according to the command of
Zeus, repeople the world by throwing behind them 'the bones of the
earth'--namely, stones, which change into men. This Deluge of Deucalion
is, in Grecian tradition, what most resembles a universal deluge. Many
authors affirm that it extended to the whole earth, and that the whole
human race perished. At Athens, in memory of the event, and to appease
the manes of its victims, a ceremony called Hydrophoria was observed,
having so close a resemblance to that in use at Hierapolis, in Syria,
that we can hardly fail to look upon it as a Syro-Phoenician
importation, and the result of an assimilation established in remote
antiquity between the Deluge of Deucalion and that of Khasisatra, as
described by the author of the treatise 'On the Syrian Goddess.' Close
to the temple of the Olympian Zeus a fissure in the soil was shown, in
length but one cubit, through which it was said the waters of the Deluge
had been swallowed up. Thus, every year, on the third day of the
festival of the Anthesteria, a day of mourning consecrated to the
dead--that is, on the thirteenth of the month of Anthesterion, toward
the beginning of March-it was customary, as at Bambyce, to pour water
into the fissure, together with flour mixed with honey, poured also into
the trench dug to the west of the tomb, in the funeral sacrifices of the
Athenians.
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