by Rick Riordan
One man called out, “Why do you have chickens painted on your chariot?”
“They’re eagles!” Salmoneus yelled.
“They look like chickens,” the man insisted.
“Silence, mortal!” Salmoneus kicked his advisor under the blanket. The advisor started pounding his kettledrums.
“See?” Salmoneus said. “I can summon thunder!”
A lady in the back said, “Who’s under the blanket behind you?”
“No one!” Salmoneus yelled, a bead of sweat trickling down his neck. This wasn’t going as well as he’d hoped, so he decided to use his props.
He pulled a torch from his bucket o’ flaming torches ($99.99 at Walmart) and tossed one toward the lady in the crowd.
The people cried and shuffled away from the torch, but it landed harmlessly on the pavement.
“There!” Salmoneus roared. “I have cast a lightning bolt at you! Do not test me, or I shall strike you down!”
“That’s a torch!” somebody yelled.
“You asked for it, mortal!” Salmoneus started lobbing torches into the crowd and kicking his advisor under the tarp to bang on his drums; but soon the novelty wore off, and the crowd got angry.
“Boo!” someone yelled.
“Imposter!” yelled another. “False ZEUS!”
“Real ZEUS!” Salmoneus yelled back. “I am ZEUS!”
“YOU’RE NOT ZEUS!” yelled the crowd.
So many people were yelling the name Zeus that the big guy himself up on Mount Olympus took notice. He looked down and saw a mortal king in a bad costume, riding around on a chariot painted with chickens, lobbing torches and calling them lightning bolts.
The god of the sky wasn’t sure whether to laugh or rage.
He decided on raging.
Storm clouds gathered over the new city of Salmonea. Real thunder shook the buildings. The sky god’s voice boomed from on high: I AM ZEUS.
A jagged bolt of lightning split the sky, blasting Salmoneus and his poor advisor into grease spots. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left but a burning chariot wheel and a half-melted kettledrum.
The mortals of Salmonea cheered. They would’ve thrown a party in Zeus’s honor for getting rid of their idiot king, but Zeus wasn’t finished.
His voice bellowed from the sky: SOME OF YOU BROUGHT HIM OFFERINGS. SOME OF YOU ACTUALLY BELIEVED 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 Deucalion and Pyrrha were nice people that way. Unfortunately, most of the servants didn’t listen. The king and the queen were getting old, so the servants figured they’d gone senile.
Deucalion and Pyrrha emptied all the old clothes and knickknacks out of the chest to make room for their provisions. The rain started to fall. Within minutes, the sky was nothing but sheets of gray water. Lightning flashed. Thunder shook the earth. In less than an hour, the whole kingdom of Thessaly was swallowed by the flood. Decalion and Pyrrha closed their chest full of supplies, lashed themselves to the lid, and floated right out the attic window.
It wasn’t a comfortable ride, shooting up and down forty-foot swells while the storm raged, chunks of debris swirled past, and the entire world was drowning. The king and queen got salt water up their noses like, a million times. But the wooden chest acted like a life preserver and kept them from going under.
After what seemed like forever, the rain stopped. The clouds broke and the sun came out. The flood slowly receded, and Deucalion an
d Pyrrha landed their chest on the slopes of Mount Parnassus.
At this point, some of you may be thinking: Hey, a guy escapes a big flood and floats to safety while the rest of the wicked human race drowns. Wasn’t there another story like that? Some dude named Noah?
Yeah, well, every ancient culture seems to have a flood story. I guess it was a pretty massive disaster. Different people remembered it different ways. Maybe Noah and Deucalion passed each other on the sea, and Deucalion was like, “An ark! Two animals of every kind! Why didn’t we think of that?”
And his wife Pyrrha would be like, “Because they wouldn’t fit in this chest, ya moron!”
But I’m just guessing.
Finally the waters sank back into the sea, and the land started to dry out.
Deucalion looked around at the empty hills of Greece and said, “Great. What do we do now?”
“First,” Pyrrha said, “we make a sacrifice to Zeus and ask him never to do this again.”
Deucalion agreed that that was a good idea, because another flood would really suck.
They sacrificed all their remaining food, along with the chest, in a big fire and pleaded with Zeus to spare them from any more power-washings.
Up on Olympus, Zeus was pleased. He was surprised that anyone had survived, but since the first thing Deucalion and Pyrrha did was honor him, he was cool with that.
NO MORE FLOODS, he voice boomed from above. BECAUSE YOU ARE PIOUS PEOPLE AND I LIKE YOU, YOU MAY ASK ANY FAVOR, AND I WILL GRANT IT.
Deucalion groveled appropriately. “Thank you, Lord Zeus! We beg you, tell us how to repopulate the earth! My wife and I are too old to have kids, and we don’t want to be the last humans alive. Let the humans come back, and this time they’ll behave. I promise!”
The sky rumbled. GO TO THE ORACLE AT DELPHI. THEY WILL ADVISE YOU.
It was a long distance, but Deucalion and Pyrrha walked all the way to the Oracle. As it happened, the people of Delphi had been warned about the flood by a bunch of howling wolves. Which god sent the wolves, I don’t know; but the people had climbed the tallest mountain near Delphi and survived the flood, so now they were back in business, dispensing prophecies and whatnot.
Deucalion and Pyrrha went into the cave of the Oracle, where an old lady sat on a three-legged stool, shrouded in green mist.
“Oh, Oracle,” Deucalion said. “Please, tell us how to repopulate the earth. And I don’t mean by having kids, because we’re too old for that nonsense!”
The Oracle’s voice was like the hissing of snakes: When you leave this place, cover your heads and throw the bones of your mother behind you as you go, and do not look back.
“The bones of my mother?” Deucalion was outraged. “She’s dead and buried. I don’t carry her bones around with me!”
I just pronounce the prophecies, the Oracle muttered. I don’t explain them. Now, shoo!
Deucalion and Pyrrha weren’t very satisfied, but they left the Oracle.
“How are we supposed to throw the bones of our mother behind us?” Deucalion asked.
Pyrrha wasn’t sure, but she covered her head with a shawl, then gave her husband an extra scarf so he could do the same, just as the Oracle had ordered. As they walked away, heads bowed, Pyrrha realized that with her shawl over her head, she could only see the ground right in front of her, which was littered with rocks.
She froze. “Husband, I have an idea. The bones of our mother. What if the prophecy doesn’t literally mean the bones of our mother? It might be a…what do you call those things? Limericks?”
“No, a limerick is a naughty poem,” Deucalion said. “You mean, a metaphor?”
“Yes! What if the bones of our mother is a metaphor?”
“Okay. But a metaphor for what?”
“The mother of everything…Mother Earth,” Pyrrha suggested. “And her bones—”
“Could mean these rocks!” Deucalion cried. “Wow, you’re smart!”
“That’s why you married me.”
So Deucalion and Pyrrha started picking up rocks and chucking them over their shoulders as they walked. They didn’t look behind them, but they could hear the rocks cracking apart like eggs as they hit the ground. Later, the king and queen found out that each rock had turned into a human. When Deucalion threw one, it turned into a man. When Pyrrha threw one, it turned into a woman.
So Zeus let the human race repopulate itself.
I’m not sure if that means we’re still the bronze race, or if we’re the stone race, or maybe the rockers? Either way, Zeus was glad to let the humans back into the world, because without them, he wouldn’t have had any pretty mortal girls to chase after.
You can’t swing a cat in Ancient Greece without hitting at least one of Zeus’s ex-girlfriends. We’ve already covered a lot of his romances, so I don’t think we need to talk about many of them here. I’ll just mention that Zeus had absolutely no shame and was endlessly creative when it came to wooing women. With each girlfriend, he shape-shifted into some weird form to get her attention. He rarely appeared in the same guise twice.
Once he got cuddly with a girl while in the form of a swan. Another time, he visited his girlfriend as a shower of golden light. He cornered other women in the forms of a snake, an eagle, a satyr, and an ant. (Seriously, how do you corner somebody when you’re an ant, and how would you…never mind.) Zeus even tricked some women by appearing as their husbands. That’s just low.
One particularly sneaky trick was when he kidnapped this lady named Europa. She was a princess. (Naturally. Aren’t they always princesses?) Zeus spied her one day at the beach, hanging out with her friends.
Zeus didn’t want to appear to her in his real godly form, because a) Hera might notice and get mad, b) when gods showed up, girls tended to run away for good reason, and c) he really wanted to talk to Europa alone. Don’t you hate it when you want to talk to a girl alone, but they always seem to travel in packs, like wolves? It’s annoying.
So Zeus transformed into a bull and galloped across the beach. He wasn’t a scary bull, though. He had soft gray eyes and a butterscotch-yellow hide with a white spot on his forehead. His horns were pearly white. He stopped on a grassy hillside near the beach and started grazing, like, Ho-hum. Don’t mind me.
All the girls noticed him. At first, they weren’t sure what to think. But the bull didn’t do anything threatening. It looked kind of cute and gentle, as far as bulls go.
“Let’s check it out,” Europa said. “He looks pretty!”
So the girls swarmed around the bull and started petting his back and feeding him handfuls of grass. The bull made gentle lowing sounds. He gave Europa the big soft eyes and generally acted cuddly and sweet.
“Awwwwwww,” all the girls said.
Europa noticed that the bull also smelled wonderful—like a combination of leather and Old Spice. She had an overpowering urge to adopt him and take him home.
Bull Zeus nuzzled her dress and then lowered his head, sinking to his front knees.
“OMG!” Europa cried. “I think he wants to take me for a ride!”
Generally speaking, princesses weren’t supposed to ride bulls, but this bull seemed so sweet and tame, Europa climbed right on his back.
“Come on, girls!” Europa called. “Let’s all—WHAA!”
Before she could help her friends climb aboard, the bull bolted straight for the ocean. Europa clung to his neck, terrified that she might get thrown. She was much too afraid to try climbing off while the bull was rampaging.
In no time, the bull was three hundred feet out to sea. Europa’s friends called to her desperately, but the beach was getting farther and farther away, and Europa wasn’t a good swimmer. She had no idea where the bull was taking her; her only choice was to hang on and hope for the best.
Zeus swam all the way to the island of Crete. Once there, he turned back into a god an
d said, “Finally, we’re alone! How you doing? I’m Zeus.”
Well, one thing led to another, and since Europa couldn’t get back home, she ended up staying on Crete, where she had three sons with Zeus. Because nobody back home knew where Europa had disappeared to, her name eventually came to mean, those lands we don’t know much about. The Greeks started calling the lands to the north of them europa, and eventually the name stuck as Europe.
Zeus didn’t always get his way with women, though.
After that little rebellion when the gods tried to overthrow him, he spent some time flirting with the Nereid Thetis—the lady who had released him from his bonds. Then Zeus heard a prophecy that Thetis was destined to give birth to a son who was greater than his father.
That freaked Zeus out pretty good.
“A kid greater than me?” he muttered to himself. “I don’t think so!”
So he broke off flirting with Thetis, and their relationship never went anywhere. Thetis eventually married a great hero named Peleus, and they had a son who was an even greater hero than his dad. In fact, he turned out to be the most powerful and famous hero in all of Greek history. His name was Achilles. So we can be thankful Zeus didn’t marry Thetis. None of us needs a super-powerful Zeus Junior running around.
Zeus by himself was powerful enough to handle anything…well, almost anything.
The only time he got schooled, fooled, and totally tooled was when he faced a monster called Typhoeus.
The stories about him are pretty confused. They can’t even agree on his name. Sometimes it’s Typhoeus. Sometimes it’s Typhon. Sometimes Typhon and Typhoeus are treated like two different monsters. To keep things simple, let’s call him Typhoeus.
What did he look like? Hard to say. He was always shrouded in storm clouds. BIG, for sure. Like, so big that his head seemed to scrape the top of the sky. His shape was more or less humanoid from the waist up, but his legs were like the bodies of boa constrictors. On each hand, he had a hundred fingers that were tipped with serpent heads, each of which had fiery eyes and spit venom, so that when he got mad, he just showered poison all over the place. This also made it totally impossible for him to get a manicure. He had massive leathery wings, long matted hair that smelled like volcanic smoke, and a face that was constantly shifting and changing so that it seemed like he had a hundred different faces—each one uglier than the last. Oh, and he breathed fire. Did I mention that?