Sandys explains that Deucalion's flood was confined to Greece and occurred several hundred years after the biblical Flood, but that Ovid, in his account, portrays it in terms of the earlier universal deluge.
754-58) However, to appreciate fully the prefigurative value of Milton's allusion to Deucalion's flood in the opening lines of Book XI, we must reassess its implications in terms of the typological patterning of the final two books of the epic.
Ovid, in his description of
Deucalion's flood in the first book of the Metamorphoses, continues the tradition of a world in chaos,
In the Greek myth, Deucalion (see
Deucalion's flood ), the son of Prometheus, is the hero who, with his wife, Pyrrha, is saved and repopulates the earth.