on and his wife Pyrrha floated
about for nine days till all men had been drowned, and as the waters went
down the ship rested on Mount Parnassus, and Deucalion and Pyrrha came
out and offered sacrifices to Jupiter. He was appeased, and sent Mercury
down to ask what he should grant them. Their prayer was that the earth
might be filled again with people, upon which the god bade them walk up
the hill and throw behind them the bones of their grandmother. Now Earth
was said to be the mother of the Titans, so the bones of their
grandmother were the rocks, so as they went they picked up stones and
threw them over their shoulders. All those that Deucalion threw rose up
as men, and all those that Pyrrha threw became women, and thus the earth
was alive again with human beings. No one can fail to see what far older
histories must have been brought in the minds of the Greeks, and have
been altered into these tales, which have much beauty in themselves. The
story of the flood seems to have been mixed up with some small later
inundation which only affected Greece.

The proper old name of Greece was Hellas, and the people whom we call
Greeks called themselves Hellenes. {29} Learned men know that they, like
all the people of Europe, and also the Persians and Hindoos, sprang from
one great family of the sons of Japhet, called Arians. A tribe called
Pelasgi came first, and lived in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy; and after
them came the Hellenes, who were much quicker and cleverer than the
Pelasgi, and became their masters in most of Greece. So that the people
we call Greeks were a mixture of the two, and they were divided into
three lesser tribes--the AEolians, Dorians, and Ionians.

[Picture: The World according to the Greeks]

Now, having told you that bit of truth, I will go back to what the Greeks
thought. They said that Deucalion had a son whose name was Hellen, and
that he again had three sons, called AEolus, Dorus, and Xuthus. AEolus
was the father of the AEolian Greeks, and some in after times thought
that he was the same with the god called AEolus, who was thought to live
in the Lipari Islands; and these keep guard over the spirits of the
winds--Boreas, the rough, lively north wind; Auster, the rainy south
wind; Eurus, the bitter east; and Zephyr, the gentle west. He kept them
in a cave, and let one out according to the way the wind was wanted to
blow, or if there was to be a storm he sent out two at