Characters
- Amphictyon — deposer of Cranaus; Deucalion’s son in one genealogy
- Atthis — daughter; eponym of Attica
- Cecrops — predecessor (background)
- Cranae, Cranaechme — other daughters
- Cranaus — autochthon king after Cecrops; reign during Deucalion’s flood
- Deucalion and Pyrrha — flood survivors of the same generation (Panhellenic)
- Erichthonius — later expels Amphictyon (forward)
- Pedias — Lacedaemonian wife
Places
- Lacedaemon — origin of Pedias
- Olympia — seat of Cranaus’s reign
- Parnassus — Deucalion’s landing in the shared flood tradition
- Rhamnus — land named from Atthis
Themes
Narrative
After Cecrops, Cranaus—another autochthon—became king of Athens. Apollodorus places in his reign the great flood of Deucalion: while Deucalion and Pyrrha floated in their chest and landed on Parnassus (or other peaks) to renew humankind, Attica too was under Cranaus’s rule, so that the local king-list and the Panhellenic flood generation touch. Cranaus married Pedias of Lacedaemon and fathered Cranae, Cranaechme, and Atthis; from Atthis the land was called Attica, a name-aetiology that sits beside Cecropia and Athena’s later naming of the city.
Amphictyon, said to be Deucalion’s son (or another autochthon), dethroned Cranaus and ruled in his stead—then was himself expelled by Erichthonius. The brief reign thus bridges serpent-formed Cecrops and the Erichthonius–Erechtheus line: autochthony continues, the flood is dated to Athens’s second king, and the country’s name is anchored to a daughter Atthis. Little combat attaches to Cranaus; his myth is chronological and onomastic—Attica’s memory of when the waters came and when the land got its familiar name.