Three Key Ancestors

According to Carlos Parada's Greek Mythology Link, the key ancestors of the major Greek families were three: Deucalion (& Pyrrha), Atlas (through his daughters the Pleiades), and Io.

Atlas 

The Pelopides 

Pelops 1 was son of Tantalus 1, son of Zeus and the Pleiad Dione 3, daughter of Atlas. Pelops 1's wife Hippodamia 3 was daughter of the Pleiad Sterope 3. The PLEIADES are daughters of Atlas. The Pelopides ruled Mycenae until the return of the HERACLIDES (descendants of Heracles 1, a descendant of Io). Pelops 1 came from Phrygia to Hellas, whereas Dardanus 1 emigrated from Hellas to Phrygia.

The Trojans 

The Trojans were also descendants of Atlas. Dardanus 1, son of Electra 3, daughter of Atlas, is at the beginning of the house of Troy, for Dardanus 1 is father of Erichthonius 1, father of Tros 1 (after whom the Trojans are called), father of Ilus 2 (founder of Ilium, that is, Troy), father of Laomedon 1, father of Priam 1, who was king when the city was destroyed. 

Some Thebans 

Among the Thebans, the usurpers Nycteus 2 and Lycus 5 were said to have come from Euboea, but they too might be descendants of Atlas, and so could beAmphion 1, grandson of Nycteus 2. Amphion 1 married Pelops 1's sister, the mother of the NIOBIDS.

Deucalion

The descendants of Deucalion 1 (and Aeolus 1) founded and ruled Thessalian cities such as Pherae, Phthia and Iolcus, but were periodically influential inThebes, Argos, Athens, and Messenia. 

Deucalion 1, the first mortal of this line and son of the Titan Prometheus 1, is father of Hellen 1, eponym of the Hellenes. From Hellen 1 sprang Dorus 1 (eponym of the Dorians), Xuthus 1, and Aeolus 1. Xuthus 1 is father of Achaeus 1 (eponym of the Achaeans), and of Ion 1 (eponym of the Ionians). The Thessalian king Aeolus 1 (different from the keeper of the winds) had many important descendants.

Io 

Ancestors and founders of important cities auch as Mycenae, Thebes, and Argos were descendants of Io. These also controlled Crete, Laconia, and perhaps Arcadia. The HERACLIDES were descendants of Io. Their house evolved first in north-east Africa, and in the mideast (Phoenicia). 

Io is the first mortal of this line. She is usually regarded as daughter of the river god Inachus, her other genealogies being more uncertain. After Io comes Epaphus 1, king of Egypt and father of Libya. Her descendants are Agenor 1, Belus 1, and Lelex 2. From Agenor 1 descended Europa and Cadmus, which is to say the houses of Crete and Thebes respectively. From Belus 1 descended Aegyptus 1 and Danaus 1, that is, the houses of Argos, and Mycenae. 

Perseus 1 (descendant of Danaus 1 and Aegyptus 1), and his own descendants reigned in Mycenae. But during Eurystheus' time or after him Mycenae came under the rule of the Pelopides, who are descendants of Atlas. The Pelopides were expelled by the HERACLIDES after the Trojan War.

Interestingly, tradition says the Athenians were a distinct group:

The Athenians do not belong originally to any of the mentioned primary families. They were the children of Gaia, or else "sons of the soil." Later Aegeus 1 married the daughter of a Pelopid, and Theseus married a descendant of Io. Even later the throne was seized by Melanthus 1, a descendant of Deucalion 1. 

The Colchians (for example Medea) are descendants of Helius, and so are the first Corinthians [see Corinth]. The Troezenians had their own origin, but afterwards Troezen was ruled by the descendants of Atlas.

Parada's page of ancestors has detailed lists of members from each family.

Heilig's Interlinear Trot

Back in the days of high school Latin, "trots" were all the rage. These interlinear translations, available for the major Roman authors -- Virgil in particular -- were much sought after and prized.

For those interested in the intricacies of Ovid's native tongue, it seems there's an 1889 trot for several selections from the Metamorphoses by George W. Heilig, available, praised be Google, here as a Google book that can be accessed online and searched, or downloaded to your hard drive as a .pdf file.

For some reason I find that a trot helps me "see" certain words that previously were somehow invisible - not only in the English translators, but also somehow I've missed them in the Latin text. One example is the word sollertia (skill, shrewdness, ingenuity, dexterity, adroitness, expertness) in the passage about Deucalion and Pyrrha. I've checked a few translators, and none has captured Deucalion's use of sollertia here:

“aut fallax” ait “est sollertia nobis,
aut pia sunt nullumque nefas oracula suadent.”

More's rendering (on the Perseus site) seems closest (compare your translation):

Oracles are just
and urge not evil deeds, or naught avails
the skill of thought.

Deucalion is saying humans have a gift, or skill, or adroitness, which if truly a gift ought not to be useless. But such a skill would be useless if the Oracle were telling us literally to find our actual mothers' bones and toss them behind our heads. So we must use our sollertia to find another way to understand this. Trusting the Oracle, in other words, means submitting to the necessity of discovering her meaning "in other words" - which happens to be the root meaning of allegory.

Cryptic Crossroads: Deucalion's Dilemma

Deucalion's speech to Pyrrha is remarkable for several reasons. In it one hears a note that will return at various moments in later centuries. The flood, reaching its maximum, has erased everything -- all life, and all landmarks, except the muddy peak of Parnassus.

when Deucalion saw its emptiness, and the deep silence of the desolate lands, he spoke to Pyrrha,

Ovid's concision here is remarkable -- in a few words, he conveys the isolation and uncertainty of human beings in a vast world which is now not merely empty, but deeply silent and contingent:

And even now there is no certain assurance of our lives; even yet do the clouds terrify my mind.

terrent etiam nunc nubila mentem.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread, Pascal will say, echoed a few hundred years later in the "nothingness" of the Existentialists.

What Deucalion does is orient his whole being away from this vast unspeaking solitude and toward the only thing in it that offers the possibility of a familiar reflection, a response -- humanity itself.

It falls to Deucalion in his speech to find in Pyrrha the locus, or symmetric other of his own being:

Wife, cousin, sole surviving woman, joined to me by our shared race, our family origins,

The Latin underscores the symmetry of their yoke:

deinde torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt

then by the marriage bed, and now joined to me in danger,

The touchstones of what is familiar are, for him, this woman bound to him by genes and by marriage, by origins and race, by bed (one thinks of the bed of Odysseus and Penelope) and by shared experience, in this case, of danger. These are the elements of human bonds, the roots of our familiarity to one another. Into them is woven speech, the memory of shared history. It's in this that Deucalion locates, again with elegant parallel clauses, the reason and core of his being:

si te quoque pontus haberet,

te sequerer, coniunx, et me quoque pontus haberet.

if the sea had you,

I would follow you, and the sea would have me too

(Hear a trace of Milton's Adam , who gives up a world for Eve?)

These humans are unlike the animals, or the demi-gods that Zeus worried about when he said, in justifying his decision to exterminate the human race:

Mine are the demigods, the wild spirits, nymphs, fauns and satyrs, and sylvan deities of the hills. Since we have not yet thought them worth a place in heaven let us at least allow them to live in safety in the lands we have given them.

Ovid's polytheistic world is full of varied creatures who seem at home in it. They live, play, don't fall afoul of just laws, and deserve Zeus's protection from violent, godless brutes like Lycaon. Humans born of the blood of the giants failed to find a niche in which they could live in harmony with all else.

Deucalion here is at a fatal ontological crossroads. His father was Prometheus, but he can't "make" men by breathing upon their shapes as his father had done. Nor can he expect to find any giant's blood. He's at a loss how to proceed, but happens to be at the temple of his grandmother, Themis, at Delphi, the omphalos of the world. It's she who'll tell him how to make a new beginning of yet a third skein of humans, from the bones (ossa) of Earth. Strangely, Deucalion and Pyrrha -- so richly intertwined by blood and marriage bed and shared danger, so fully necessary to each other that neither would choose to remain in this vast world without the other -- neither make love nor gestate progeny. They reverently throw stones.

What we must note is, they only throw stones after construing the cryptic speech of the Oracle in a way that doesn't involve the literal bones of their literal mothers -- which would be a desecration. The continuation of the human race here rests upon an act of reading -- close reading -- that metamorphoses from the literally unspeakable into a figural divination of meaning.

Blog in Prog

I want to underscore a couple of things in Deucalion's speech to Pyrrha, and will do so [update: it's here - directly above this post] - meanwhile, here's the speech in question, with English below:

Redditus orbis erat. Quem postquam vidit inanem
et desolatas agere alta silentia terras,
350Deucalion lacrimis ita Pyrrham adfatur obortis:

“O soror, o coniunx, o femina sola superstes,
quam commune mihi genus et patruelis origo,
deinde torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt,
terrarum, quascumque vident occasus et ortus,
355nos duo turba sumus; possedit cetera pontus.
Haec quoque adhuc vitae non est fiducia nostrae
certa satis; terrent etiam nunc nubila mentem.
Quis tibi, si sine me fatis erepta fuisses,
nunc animus, miseranda, foret? quo sola timorem
360ferre modo posses? quo consolante doleres?
Namque ego (crede mihi) si te quoque pontus haberet,
te sequerer, coniunx, et me quoque pontus haberet.

O utinam possim populos reparare paternis
artibus atque animas formatae infundere terrae!
365Nunc genus in nobis restat mortale duobus
(sic visum superis) hominumque exempla manemus.”

Dixerat, et flebant. Meta 1. 370 ff

The world was restored. But when Deucalion saw its emptiness, and the deep silence of the desolate lands, he spoke to Pyrrha, through welling tears.

‘Wife, cousin, sole surviving woman, joined to me by our shared race, our family origins, then by the marriage bed, and now joined to me in danger, we two are the people of all the countries seen by the setting and the rising sun, the sea took all the rest. Even now our lives are not guaranteed with certainty: the storm clouds still terrify my mind. How would you feel now, poor soul, if the fates had willed you to be saved, but not me? How could you endure your fear alone? Who would comfort your tears? Believe me, dear wife, if the sea had you, I would follow you, and the sea would have me too.

If only I, by my father’s arts, could recreate earth’s peoples, and breathe life into the shaping clay! The human race remains in us. The gods willed it that we are the only examples of mankind left behind.’

He spoke and they wept . . . Kline