But, I confess, it appears to me to afford no small confirmation to the arguments and the conclusions of these pages, when we remember that not only do the four rules for the sense of the phrase suit, as far as we can tell, all the six persons to whom it is applied, but that there is absolutely no other living person named in the poems, whom they would not effectually exclude, with the insignificant exceptions, first of Admetus, who has just been mentioned, and next of Orestes. In the Iliad, Orestes is only named in one single passage (twice repeated), of the Ninth Book[884]. In the Odyssey he is named several times, but the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν is less suitable to the political state of Greece as it appears in this poem, and also to the subject. It never appears, except retrospectively.

A few words may perhaps be due to the case of Polyxeinus, grandson of Augeias, who, it is just possible, though unlikely, may have retained the position of his grandfather. It is just possible, because we are not assured of the contrary; but most unlikely, because Augeias appears as lord of the Epeans, Polyxeinus only as commanding a division of them. Again, Polyxeinus is only once mentioned. It is also evident that the loss of his grandfather’s throne, by a revolution in Elis, might naturally put an end to the application of the title in his particular case, by a process exactly the same with that to which its general and final extinction, now so speedily to arrive, was due.

It might indeed be of some interest to inquire why it is that, when Homer makes no practical or effective use of the phrase for any one except Agamemnon, he has notwithstanding been careful to register, as it were, a title to it on behalf of five other persons? Nor can I doubt that the just answer would be, that he did this because, with his historic aims, he may have deemed it a matter of national interest to record a title of such peculiar and primitive significance.

Its disappearance with Homer.

But of all the negative arguments that tend to show ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν not to have been a merely vague title, there is none on which I dwell with more confidence than its total disappearance with the Homeric age. For it was not so with the other less peculiar forms, βασιλεὺς, ἄναξ, and κρείων. Although they were supplanted in actual use by the term τυραννὸς, which became for the Greeks the type of supreme power in the hands of a single person, yet the idea of them was traditionally retained. Accordingly, even the name βασιλεὺς was applied by Greek writers to contemporary kings out of Greece, and to the old bygone Greek monarchies: and Thucydides has given it to them as a class, where he describes the πατρικαὶ βασιλεῖαι[885]. But the phrase ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, the most specific of them all, disappears even from retrospective use: and the inference is, that its proper meaning had ceased to be represented in the institutions either of Greece or of the known world beyond the Greek borders; that it had passed away with the archaic system, of which it was the peculiar token.

Even independently of direct testimony, we might be assured that the patriarchal and highland constitution of society could not very long survive the multiplication of settlements in the plains. For the wealth, which these settlements created through the increased efficiency of labour, the greater bounty of the earth, and the augmented means of communication and exchange, could not but bring with it at once new temptations, and new sources of disturbance; whereas the art of controlling these evils was but painfully and slowly, and most incompletely learned. Among highland tribes, there might be war and pillage with a view to immediate wants: but stored wealth could not be stolen, where, except in its simplest forms, it did not exist: and men do not overturn hereditary power, or drag society into revolutions, without an object.

But the Catalogue, as well as other parts of the Homeric poems, show us how the causes thus indicated had already worked. Of the Greek States comprised in that invaluable enumeration, some were, as is plainly asserted or implied, monarchically governed: for example, the Mycenians, the Spartans, the Pylians, the Myrmidons, the Arcadians, the Eubœans[886], and the Ætolians. We may reasonably infer the same with regard to the followers of those great chiefs, who are treated as Βασιλεῖς in the body of the poems: the Salaminians and Locrians, each under their Ajax, the Cephallenians under Ulysses, the Cretans, or else a portion of them, under Idomeneus, the Argives under Diomed. In each of these cases, either there is but a single leader, or, as in the two last, the text makes it obvious that the chief first named is supreme in rank. We may probably infer that monarchy prevailed in all the instances, including the Athenians, when only a single general appears. The expression δῆμος, applied to Athens, is perfectly compatible with kingship in Homer. But there remain six cases, where there are a plurality of leaders, apparently on an equal footing. These are the cases of

1. The Bœotians.

2. The people of Aspledon and the Minyeian Orchomenus; who are in fact a second Bœotian contingent.

3. The Phocians.