Publius Ovidius Naso Illustration of Ovid’s story of Deucalion and Pyrrha

Whose bones are the stones?

Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18), a Roman poet from Sulmo, tells in the first book of the Metamorphoses how human beings come to inhabit the earth again after a flood. Deucalion and Pyrrha have survived. When they ask for help they receive a puzzling instruction. They are to throw their great mother’s bones behind their backs. Pyrrha shrinks from doing such a thing to the dead. Her hesitation gives Deucalion a reason to listen to the words again.

A riddle with two mothers

The great mother is the earth. The stones in the earth’s body, I think, are what is meant by her bones. These are what we are told to throw behind our backs.

– Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, 1951, p. 30–31.[1]

The solution begins with a change of scale. The mother might be the one who carries and nourishes them both. If the earth has a body, something within it might answer to her bones. Deucalion makes no claim to have understood the divine command beyond a doubt. Ovid puts a small qualification in his mouth, “I think.” Only when the two bend down, pick up the stones and cast them behind their backs will they learn whether he has understood.

How a vein keeps its name

Ovid allows the discarded stones to become people by degrees. At first their outlines recall figures roughly hewn from marble by a sculptor who has only just begun. The moist and earthy parts turn into flesh, the stiff substance into bones. The poet has an easier time with the veins. A stone has veins and a body has veins, so the word can stay. The story leads from an expression two people have to puzzle out to a word that people and stones already share.