We have already seen stray signs of the Pelasgic affinities between the two contending parties: but it would now appear, that there were affinities in the Hellic line also: and if so, then this institution of chieftaincy, standing above merely political supremacy, and indicated by the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, may probably have subsisted among Trojans as well as Greeks.
The less warlike character of the Trojans, their more oriental manners, and their less multiform and imaginative religion, all point to considerable differences in the composition of the people. The Pelasgic ingredient was probably stronger in Troy: it appears to have had more influence over religion, manners, and institutions. But the circumstances mentioned above are tokens of an infusion of Hellic blood in the populations that inhabited Troas. Now this was nowhere so likely to be found as in the royal family; for we see the governing faculty everywhere accompanying the Hellic tribes through Greece, and asserting itself both by the acquisition of political power, and by the energetic use of it. Everywhere it rises, by a natural buoyancy, to the summit of society; and gives their first vent, in miniature, to those energies, which were afterwards to defy, or even to subdue the world.
At the same time, though it is in connection with the Hellic families alone that we find the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν among the Greeks, we need not proceed so far as to deny the possibility that it might also have been a Pelasgic institution, and that its non-appearance, in connection with their name, might be sufficiently accounted for simply by their loss of political power. We have no reason to suppose the Pelasgi and Helli to have been families of mankind whose characters were in radical and absolute opposition to one another: the completeness of their fusion after a short period seems to prove, that, though with a different distribution of capacities and tendencies, they must have had many and important points of contact.
IV. Case of Augeias.
Let us take next the case of Augeias.
He appears in three passages of the Iliad.
1. The Epeans, who inhabited Elis, with Bouprasium and other towns enumerated in the Catalogue, and lying in the north-western corner of the Peloponnesus, sent to the Trojan war forty ships, in four divisions, under four separate leaders, and without any head over the whole contingent. The fourth named of these is Polyxeinus, son of Agasthenes, himself a lord (ἄναξ), and the son of Augeias.
2. In the Eleventh Book, Nestor gives the curious history of the war of his boyhood or earliest youth, between the Elians (v. 671), called also Epeans (688), and the Pylians.
Neleus had sent to Elis a chariot with four horses to contend in the games, of which a tripod was the prize. The horses were detained by Augeias (v. 701).
τοὺς δ’ αὖθι ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν Αὐγείας
κάσχεθε.