4. And if so, then Eumelus, who was Æolid too, falls within the same description.
5. Augeias in like manner attains to the same honour by the Homeric presumptions which make him an Æolid, as well as by all extra-Homeric tradition.
6. With regard to Euphetes and Agamemnon, we have no direct evidence. But we have seen strong reason to suppose, that Euphetes was himself an Æolid: and no inconsiderable presumption that Tantalus was according to Homer what the later tradition makes him, a son of Jupiter, and that Agamemnon was descended from Tantalus.
Perhaps also, without venturing to attach any conclusive weight to such a sign, we may interpret the annexation of Διοτρεφὴς and Διογενὴς to Hellic kingship, as a sign that the earliest Hellic kingship, being also that which conveyed the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, was always associated with divine descent.
Among those who bear the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, we find no case of a descent from Jupiter reputed to be recent. The two lines in which the title is most clearly transmitted, those of Æolus and of Dardanus, are among the oldest genealogies in Homer. That of Agamemnon, apparently the shortest, interposes at the least four generations between Jupiter and him.
The line of Dardanus is apparently by one generation longer than any of the others belonging to an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν. But nothing can be more natural: for any settlement, made by the Helli on the Hellespont during their eastward movement, would naturally precede by some time their descent from Olympus and the Thracian hills into Thessaly; so that the earlier date of the primary ancestor is a witness for, rather than against the relationship.
It cannot, however, be too carefully borne in mind, that the divine descent of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν from Jupiter is widely different from that of the more recent heroes, like Sarpedon or Hercules. We may suppose that in such cases as these the divine parent either screens the result of unlawful love, or perhaps indicates the sudden rise into eminence of a family previously obscure: with the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν the case is quite distinct. The poetical meaning here is, that backward there lay nothing of family history beyond the ancestor from whom he claimed descent, whether it were Dardanus, or Æolus, or Tantalus: as if aiming at the effect legitimately produced by those words in the Gospel of St. Luke, with which the upward line of the genealogy given by him closes; ‘which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God[878].’ And the historic basis of the allegory may probably be this, that the person indicated was one of some ruling house, who, with his followers or kindred, separated from the migratory race of Helli as it swept westward along the hills, and founded a stable settlement, and a society more or less organized in orders and employments, in which his name became the symbol at once of sovereign rank, of the national point of origin, and of affinity in blood with a ruling race.
Four notes of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν.
To conclude then: the notes of the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν in Homer, probable or demonstrative, are these: