THAT FOOL!
“No!” the mortals yelled, groveling and cowering. “Please!”
I CANNOT ALLOW THIS CITY TO EXIST, Zeus rumbled. I MUST MAKE YOU AN EXAMPLE SO THAT THIS NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN. LIGHTNING BOLTS INCOMING IN FIVE, FOUR, THREE…
The mortals broke ranks and ran, but Zeus didn’t give them much time. Some people made it out of Salmonea alive, but when the lightning bolts started coming down, most of the mortals were blown to bits or buried under the rubble.
Zeus wiped the city of Salmonea off the map. No one dared to repopulate the area for another generation, all because of one guy with a bad Zeus costume, a chicken chariot, and a bucket o’ torches.
Overkill. Literally. But it wasn’t the worst punishment Zeus ever doled out. One time he decided to destroy the entire human race.
I don’t even know why. Apparently humans were behaving badly. Maybe they weren’t making the proper sacrifices, or they didn’t believe in the gods, or they were cursing a lot and driving over the speed limit.
Whatever. Zeus got angry and decided to destroy the entire race. I mean, Come on. How bad could the humans have been? I’m sure they weren’t doing anything humans haven’t always done. But Zeus decided enough was enough. He acted like one of those teachers who lets you get away with stuff all semester and then one day, for no apparent reason, decides to crack down way too hard. Like, “All right, that’s it! Everybody is getting detention right now! The whole class!”
Like, Dude, please. There are options between nothing and going nuclear.
Anyway, Zeus called the gods together and broke the news.
“Humans are disgusting!” he cried. “I’m going to destroy them.”
The throne room was silent. Finally Demeter said, “All of them?”
“Sure,” Zeus said.
“How?” asked Ares. The god of war had an eager gleam in his eyes. “Fire? Lightning? We could get a bunch of chain saws and—”
“Bug bombs,” Zeus said. “We set a few of those babies off, leave the world for a few days, and—”
“No one has invented bug bombs yet,” Hera pointed out.
“Oh, right.” Zeus frowned. “Then a flood. I’ll open the skies and unleash torrents of rain until all the humans drown!”
Poseidon grunted. “Floods are my department.”
“You can help,” Zeus offered.
“But without humans,” Hestia asked from the hearth, “who will worship you, my lord? Who will build your temples and burn your sacrifices?”
“We’ll think of something,” Zeus said. “This isn’t the first race of humans, after all. We can always make more.”
According to the old stories, this was technically true. The humans back in Kronos’s time had been called the golden race. Supposedly they’d all died out and been replaced by the silver race. The ones in the early days of Mount Olympus were called the bronze race. What made those humans different from us? There are a lot of stories, but the main thing was: they died off, and we haven’t…yet.
“Besides,” Zeus continued, “a flood is good. We need to give the earth a proper power-washing once in a while to get all the grime off the sidewalks.”
Reluctantly, the gods agreed to his plan, but many of them had favorite humans, so they secretly sent warnings in the form of dreams or omens. Because of this, a few people survived. The most famous were the king and queen of Thessaly in northern Greece: a guy named Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha.
Deucalion was human, but his dad was the Titan Prometheus—the dude who’d brought men fire and was now chained up on a mountain far away, getting his liver pecked out by an eagle.
I’m not sure how Prometheus managed to have a mortal kid with all the other stuff he had going on. You can’t exactly join a dating service when you’re chained to a rock being tortured. Whatever the case, Prometheus somehow heard about Zeus’s plan, and he still had a lot of love for humanity. He especially didn’t want his own son Deucalion to drown, because Deucalion was a good guy. He was always respectful to the gods and treated his subjects well.
So Prometheus warned him in a dream, FLOOD COMING! GATHER SUPPLIES IN THE BIGGEST CHEST YOU CAN FIND! HURRY!
Deucalion woke up in a cold sweat. He told his wife about the dream, and she remembered a huge oak chest they kept up in the attic. They grabbed some food and water from the kitchen and ran upstairs, warning all their servants along the way: “Get your families. There’s a flood coming! Seek higher ground!,” because