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[1] Enough of my discussion of this question. Hēraklēs afterwards took Elis and sacked it, with an army he had raised of Argives, Thebans and Arcadians. The Eleians were aided by the men of Pisa and of Pylos in Elis. The men of Pylos were punished by Hēraklēs, but his expedition against Pisa was stopped by an oracle from Delphi that goes like this:
My father cares for Pisa, but to me in the hollows of Pythō.
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This oracle proved the salvation of Pisa. To Phyleus Hēraklēs gave up the land of Elis and all the rest, more out of respect for Phyleus than because he wanted to do so: he allowed him to keep the prisoners, and Augeias to escape punishment.
[2] The women of Elis, it is said, seeing that their land had been deprived of its vigorous manhood, prayed to Athena that they might conceive at their first union with their husbands. Their prayer was answered, and they set up a sanctuary of Athena surnamed Mother. Both wives and husbands were so delighted at their union that they named the place itself where they first met, Badu [sweet], and the river that runs thereby Badu Water, this being a word of their native dialect.
[3] When Phyleus had returned to Doulikhion after organizing the affairs of Elis, Augeias died at an advanced age, and the kingdom of Elis devolved on Agasthenes, the son of Augeias, and on Amphimakhos and Thalpios. For the sons of Aktor married twin sisters, the daughters of Dexamenos who was king at Olenos; Amphimakhos was born to one son and Theronikē, Thalpios to her sister Theraiphone and Eurytos.
[4] However, neither Amarynkeus himself nor his son Diores remained common people. Incidentally this is shown by Homer
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in his list of the Eleians; he makes their whole fleet to consist of forty ships, half of them under the command of Amphimakhos and Thalpios, and of the remaining twenty he puts ten under Diores, the son of Amarynkeus, and ten under Polyxenos, the son of Agasthenes. Polyxenos came back safe from Troy and begot a son, Amphimakhos. This name I think Polyxenos gave his son because of his friendship with Amphimakhos, the son of Kteatos, who died at Troy.
[5] Amphimakhos begot Eleios, and it was while Eleios was king in Elis that the assembly of the Dorian army under the sons of Aristomakhos took place, with a view to returning to the Peloponnesus. To their kings was delivered this oracle, that they were to choose the “one with three eyes” to lead them on their return. When they were at a loss as to the meaning of the oracle, they were met by a man driving a mule, which was blind of one eye.
[6] Kresphontes inferred that this was the man indicated by the oracle, and so the Dorians made him one of themselves. He urged them to descend upon the Peloponnesus in ships, and not to attempt to go across the Isthmus with a land army. Such was his advice, and at the same time, he led them on the voyage from Naupaktos to Molykrion. In return, they agreed to give him at his request the land of Elis. The man was Oxylos, son of Haimon, the son of Thoas. This was the Thoas who helped the sons of Atreus to destroy the empire of Priam, and from Thoas to Aitolos the son of Endymion are six generations.
[7] There were ties of kindred between the Herakleidai and the kings of Aetolia; in particular the mothers of Thoas, the son of Andraemon, and of Hyllos, the son of Hēraklēs, were sisters. It fell to the lot of Oxylos to be an outlaw from Aetolia. The story goes that as he was throwing the discus, he missed the mark and committed unintentional homicide. The man killed by the discus, according to one account, was Thermios, the brother of Oxylos; according to another, it was Alkidokos, the son of Skopios.
Description of Greece. Pausanias. ed. W. H. S. Jones, ed. H. A. Ormerod, ed. Gregory Nagy. . .