When the world had dried enough for Pyrrha and Deucalion (who is said to have been eighty-two years old at this time) to travel safely down the mountainside, they made their way to Delphi, which lies in the valley below Parnassus. There they consulted the oracle of Themis, the prophetic Titaness whose special quality was an understanding of the right thing to do.
‘O Themis, Mother of Justice, Peace and Order, instruct us, we beseech you,’ they cried. ‘We are alone in the world now and too advanced in years to fill this empty world with offspring.’
‘Children of Prometheus and Epimetheus,’ the oracle intoned. ‘Hear my voice and do as I command. Cover your head and throw the bones of your mother over your shoulder.’
Not a word more could the perplexed couple induce the oracle to utter.
‘My mother was Pandora,’ said Pyrrha, sitting on the ground. ‘And I must presume she is drowned. Where could I find her bones?’
‘My mother is Clymene,’ said Deucalion. ‘Or, if you believe variant sources, she is the Oceanid Hesione. In either case they are both immortals and therefore alive and surely unwilling to give up their bones.’
‘We must think,’ said Pyrrha. ‘The bones of our mother. Can that have another meaning? Our mother’s bones. Maternal bones … Think, Deucalion, think!’
Deucalion covered his head with a folded cloth, sat down next to his wife, whose head was already covered, and pondered the problem with creased brow. Oracles. They always paltered and prevaricated. Moodily he picked up a rock and sent it rolling down the hillside. Pyrrha grabbed his arm.
‘Our mother!’
Deucalion stared at her. She had started slapping the ground with the palms of her hands. ‘Gaia! Gaia is mother of us all,’ she cried. ‘Our Mother Earth! These are the bones of our mother, look …’ She started to gather up rocks from the ground. ‘Come on!’
Deucalion got to his feet and scrabbled around, collecting rocks and stones. They made their way across the fields below Delphi, casting them over their shoulders as instructed, but not daring to look back until they had covered many stadia.
When they turned the sight that greeted them filled their hearts with joy.
From out of the ground where Pyrrha’s stones had landed sprang girls and women, hundreds of them, smiling and healthy and fully formed. From the earth where Deucalion’s stones had fallen boys and men grew up.
So it was that the old Pelasgians drowned in the Great Deluge, and the Mediterranean world was repopulated by a new race descended through Deucalion and Pyrrha from Prometheus, Epimetheus, Pandora and – most importantly of course – from Gaia.fn7
And that is who we are, a compound of foresight and impulse, of all gifts and of the earth.
Death
Our human race, now satisfactorily comprised equally of males and females, bred and spread about the world building cities and establishing nation states. Ships and chariots, cottages and castles, culture and commerce, merchants and markets, farming and finance, weapons and wheat. In short, civilization began. It was an age of kings, queens, princes and princesses, of hunters, warriors, shepherds, potters and poets. An age of empires, slaves, warfare, trade and treaties. An age of votive offerings, sacrifices and worship. Towns and villages chose their favourite gods and goddesses to be guardian deities, patrons and protectors. The immortals themselves were not shy to come down in their own forms, or in the forms of humans and animals, to have their way with such humans as appealed to them or to punish those that aggravated them and reward those that most fawned on them. The gods never tired of flattery.
Perhaps most importantly the plague of sorrows that had flown from Pandora’s jar ensured that from this point onwards humanity would have to face the inevitability of death in all its forms. Sudden death, slow lingering death, death by violence, death by disease, death by accident, death by murder and death by divine decree.
The god Hades found, to his great delight – or the closest to delight that gloomy god could ever manage – that the shades of more and more dead humans began to arrive at his subterranean kingdom. Hermes was assigned a new role – that of Arch Psychopomp, or ‘chief conductor of souls’ – a duty he discharged with his customary sprightliness and puckish humour. Though, as the human population grew, only the most important dead were granted the honour of a personal escort by Hermes, the rest were taken by Thanatos, the grim, forbidding figure of Death.
The instant that human spirits departed their bodies, Hermes or Thanatos would lead them to the underground cavern where the River Styx (Hate) met the River Acheron (Woe). There the grim and silent Charon held out his hand to receive his payment for ferrying the souls across the Styx. If the dead had no payment to offer they would have to wait on the bank a hundred years before the disobliging Charon consented to take them. To avoid this limbo it became a custom amongst the living to place some money, usually an obolus, on the tongue of the dying to pay the ferryman and assure safe and swift passage.fn8 When he had taken his fee, Charon would pull the dead soul aboard and pole his rust-coloured punt or skiff over the black, Stygian waters to the disembarkation stage, hell’s muster point.fn9 Once dead, no mortal could go back to the upper world. Immortals, if they tasted so much as a morsel of food or drink in Hades, were fated to return to the infernal kingdom.
And what was their final destination? It seems that this rather depended on the kind of life they had led. At first Hades himself was the arbiter, but in later years he delegated the Great Weighing Up to two sons of Zeus and EUROPA – MINOS and RHADAMANTHUS who, after their own deaths, were appointed, along with their half-brother aeacus, Judges of the Underworld. They decided whether an individual had lived a heroic, average or punishably wicked life.fn10
The heroes and those deemed exceedingly righteous (as well as the dead who had some divine blood in them) found themselves transported to the Elysian Fields, which lay somewhere on the archipelago known as the Fortunate Isles, or Isles of the Blessed. There is no real agreement as to where this might actually be. Perhaps they are what we now call the Canaries, perhaps the Azores, the Lesser Antilles or even Bermuda.fn11 Later descriptions place the Elysian Fields within the kingdom of Hades itself.fn12 In these accounts souls who reincarnated three times, on each occasion leading a heroic, just and virtuous life, then earned themselves a transfer from Elysium to the Isles of the Blessed.
The blameless majority, whose lives were neither especially virtuous nor especially vicious, might expect to be parked for eternity in the Meadows of Asphodel, whose name derived from the white flowers that carpeted its fields. These souls were guaranteed a pleasant enough afterlife: before they arrived they drank of the waters of forgetfulness from the River Lethe so that a blithe and bland eternity could be passed, untroubled by upsetting memories of earthly life.
But the sinners – the debauched, blasphemous, wicked and dissolute – what of them? The least of them flitted in the halls of Hades, eternally without feeling, strength or any real consciousness of their existence, but the most profane and unpardonable were taken to the Fields of Punishment, which lay between the Meadows of Asphodel and the abysmal depths of Tartarus itself. Here tortures that fitted their crimes with diabolical exactness were inflicted on them for all eternity. We will meet some of the more celebrated of these sinners at a later date. Names like SISYPHUS, IXION and TANTALUS still ring through the ages.
While Homer describes the spirits of the departed as keeping the faces and appearance they had in life, alternative accounts tell of a hideous demon called EURYNOMOS who met the dead and, like the Furies, stripped the flesh from their bones. Other poets suggest that the souls of the underworld were capable of speech and given to relating their life stories to each other.