Ovid's Metamorphoses places the flood of Deucalion in the aftermath of the story of Lycaon, a king who, testing whether his visitor was truly a god, served Zeus a meal that included human flesh; Zeus, disgusted at the impiety of the whole Bronze Age generation Lycaon exemplified, resolves to destroy humanity and turns Lycaon himself into a wolf as a foretaste of the punishment to come. Rejecting fire as a means, for fear of setting the heavens themselves alight, Zeus instead unleashes every rain cloud in the sky and asks his brother Poseidon to add the rivers and the sea, until the whole earth is submerged and only the peak of Mount Parnassus, in some versions Mount Othrys, remains above the waves.
Only two mortals survive: Deucalion, son of the fire-bringing Titan Prometheus, and his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. Warned in advance by his father to prepare a vessel, Deucalion builds a wooden chest and rides out the flood with Pyrrha inside it, coming to rest on the mountain as the waters recede. Finding themselves the last two people alive in a silent, mud-covered world, the couple weep and pray at the nearby shrine of the goddess Themis, asking how humanity might be restored.