DEIICA'LION, according to the Greek myth, was a son of Prometheus, grandson of Iapetus, and husband of Pyrrha. When Zeus had resolved to destroy the race of men by a flood, D. built and provisioned, by the advice of his father, an ark or ship, which he entered along with his wife. The flood came, and all Hellas was submerged. D. floated about for nine days, and on the subsidence of the waters, the ark rested on Mt. Parnassus. Other versions of the myth, however, make it rest on Mt. Othrys in saly, on Mt. Athos, or on Mt. Etna in Sicily. D. and Pyrrha, according to one account, now offered up sacrifice to Zeus Pkyxius, i.e., Zeus, the protector of fugitives, and prayed that he would repeople the world, which he did; but the more common tradition was, that they went to the sanctuary of Themis for this purpose, and were told by the goddess that they must throw behind them the bones of their mother as they departed from the temple. Understanding by the " bones of their mother," the stones of the
earth, they obeyed the injunction, and from those thrown by D. sprang up men, and from those by Pyrrha, women. D. built his first dwelling-place at Opus or Cynus. Ho is also said to have founded the sanctuary of Olympian Jove at Athens, and in later ages his tomb in the vicinity was long pointed out. D. had by-Pyrrha several children, Amphictyon, Protogeneia, and others. It was at one time extensively believed, even by intelligent scholars, that the myth of D. was a corrupted tradition of the .Noachian deluge, but this untenable opinion is now all but universally abandoned. The myth is a comparatively late one, being mentioned neither by Homer nor Hesiod.