The enormous iniquity with which earth was contaminated—as Apollodôrus says, by the then existing brazen race, or as others say, by the fifty monstrous sons of Lykaôn—provoked Zeus to send a general deluge.[216] An unremitting and terrible rain laid the whole of Greece under water, except the highest mountain-tops, whereon a few stragglers found refuge. Deukaliôn was saved in a chest or ark, which he had been forewarned by his father Promêtheus to construct. After floating for nine days on the water, he at length landed on the summit of Mount Parnassus. Zeus having sent Hermês to him, promising to grant whatever he asked, he prayed that men and companions might be sent to him in his solitude: accordingly Zeus directed both him and Pyrrha to cast stones over their heads: those cast by Pyrrha became women, those by Deukaliôn men. And thus the “stony race of men” (if we may be allowed to translate an etymology which the Greek language presents exactly, and which has not been disdained by Hesiod, by Pindar, by Epicharmus, and by Virgil) came to tenant the soil of Greece.[217] Deukaliôn on landing from the ark sacrificed a grateful offering to Zeus Phyxios, or the God of escape; he also erected altars in Thessaly to the twelve great gods of Olympus.[218] [216] Apollodôrus connects this deluge with the wickedness of the brazen race in Hesiod, according to the practice general with the logographers of stringing together a sequence out of legends totally unconnected with each other (i. 7, 2). [217] Hesiod, Fragm. 135. ed. Markts. ap. Strabo. vii. p. 322, where the word λάας, proposed by Heyne as the reading of the unintelligible text, appears to me preferable to any of the other suggestions. Pindar, Olymp. ix. 47. Ἄτερ δ᾽ Εὐνᾶς ὁμόδαμον Κτησάσθαν λίθινον γόνον· Λαοὶ δ᾽ ὠνόμασθεν. Virgil, Georgic i. 63. “Unde homines nati, durum genus.” Epicharmus ap. Schol. Pindar. Olymp. ix. 56. Hygin. f. 153. Philochorus retained the etymology, though he gave a totally different fable, nowise connected with Deukaliôn, to account for it; a curious proof how pleasing it was to the fancy of the Greek (see Schol. ad Pind. 1. c. 68). [218] Apollod. i. 7, 2. Hellanic. Fragm. 15. Didot. Hellanikus affirmed that the ark rested on Mount Othrys, not on Mount Parnassus (Fragm. 16. Didot). Servius (ad Virgil. Eclog. vi. 41) placed it on Mount Athôs—Hyginus (f. 153) on Mount Ætna.