An Arcadian prince of Tegea, son of Lycurgus and grandson of Aleus, who sailed with Jason to Colchis carrying his great double-edged battle-axe. He is to be kept distinct from the other Argonaut Ancaeus, the son of Poseidon who took the Argo's helm after Tiphys died.1
Apollonius sets him in the Argonaut roll as the third Arcadian: after Amphidamas and Cepheus, the sons of Aleus who dwelt in Tegea and the allotment of Apheidas, came Ancaeus, sent by his father Lycurgus — the brother older than both, who stayed behind to care for the aged Aleus and gave his son in his place. Ancaeus went clad in the skin of a Maenalian bear and wielding a huge two-edged battle-axe, for his grandsire Aleus had hidden the war-gear away in the hope of keeping him at home.2
On the Argo he ranked among the foremost. When the benches were drawn by lot, the middle bench was left unballoted for Heracles and for Ancaeus who dwelt in Tegea, the two seated apart from the rest. At the launching sacrifice it was these two who slew the bulls — Heracles felling one with his club, while Ancaeus shore through the broad neck of the other with his axe of bronze.3
In the battle against the Bebrycians the same gear marks him in the press: Ancaeus, the dauntless son of Lycurgus, seized his huge axe and, holding a bear's dark hide in his left hand, plunged into the midst of the enemy with furious onset — the bearskin, the double-axe, and the patronymic together fixing him apart from the Poseidon-born Ancaeus who later steers the ship.4
Pausanias, the master Arcadian source, gives the shape of his life. After Aleus died, Lycurgus took the Tegean kingdom as the eldest; of his two sons, Ancaeus and Epochus, Epochus fell ill and died, while Ancaeus joined Jason's expedition to Colchis. Afterwards, hunting the Calydonian boar with Meleager, he was killed by the brute.5
Apollodorus enrolls Ancaeus both among the Calydonian boar-hunters and among the Argonauts as a son of Lycurgus from Arcadia, and in his genealogy makes him one of Lycurgus's sons — alongside Epochus, Amphidamas and Iasus — born of Cleophyle or Eurynome.6
Ovid stages the death in the hunt. The double-axe-bearing Arcadian — named as Ancaeus — boasts that a man's weapon will far outdo a woman's, a jab at Atalanta, and brandishes his axe against the boar; the beast drives its twin tusks up into his groin, and Ancaeus falls, his entrails pouring out in a flood of blood. Later, as the dying Meleager burns from his mother's brand, he calls Ancaeus happy for the wounds that brought his death.7
In his own city the wound was set in stone. On the front gable of the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, Pausanias saw Epochus supporting Ancaeus, now wounded and having dropped his axe, among Castor, Amphiaraus and the other hunters about the boar.8
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