3. That he was the son of Hercules, with whose name disturbance and convulsion are so much associated.
In the case of the sons of Asclepius, there is the same presumption that they divided a power which had been monarchical: and although the epithet κλωμακόεσσα given to Ithome, the site of which is unknown[889], may suggest rough and broken ground, yet the territory is within the limits of Thessaly[890], and on the river Peneus. Tricce was known in the historic times; and it is mentioned in Homer with the epithet ἱππόβοτος, indicating fertility.
Signs of political disorganisation.
Here, then, and particularly in the Bœotian and Elian cases, we have considerable signs of the weakening and gradual breaking up of the old highland institutions: I distinguish between those two and the rest, because where the division is only between two brothers, it may have implied little deviation from the monarchical form. Still that little might be the first stage of a deviation which was soon to grow indefinitely large.
There are other signs to the same effect, both in the Iliad, and to a greater extent in the Odyssey.
For example: the dynasty of the Œneids had disappeared among the Ætolians[891]: the dynasty of the Æolids, and the name Ephyre, from Corinth[892]: Polyxeinus, the grandson of Augeias, an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, is not described as an ἄναξ, or lord, at all: Hercules had laid waste the cities about Ephyre, and the cities about Pylos[893]: Tlepolemus, at war with his Heraclid relations, had been driven to emigrate to Rhodes: and all this since the family of the Perseids had disappeared before the Pelopids.
The changes observable in the Odyssey are such as connect themselves with a species of deluge, which had apparently overspread the face of the political society of Greece. They would merit a full examination, in connection with a view of the relation of that poem to the Iliad. Here it need only be observed, that the ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν appears nowhere in the action of the Odyssey: the phrase is used but twice, and then only with reference to the dead Agamemnon: and that the partial disappearance of the word from the later work of Homer evidently accompanies a great approach towards disorganisation of the old order of things and ideas in the political state of Greece.
Summary of the whole.
I may now collect the results, as far as they are related to the present subject, of our whole ethnological inquiry.