An Aetolian exile riding a one-eyed horse, whom the Heraclids took as their oracle-appointed guide for the Return after a seer's curse had wrecked their first attempt; in reward he received the land of Elis.1
When the Heraclids' first attempt at the Return failed and the soothsayer's curse fell on them, the oracle bade Temenus banish the slayer Hippotes for ten years and take for his guide the Three-Eyed One. Searching, they chanced upon Oxylus, son of Andraemon, a man sitting on a one-eyed horse, its other eye knocked out by an arrow; he had fled to Elis on account of a murder and was now returning to Aetolia after a year. Guessing that this fulfilled the oracle, they made him their guide.2
Pausanias tells that Oxylus led the Dorians, the sons of Aristomachus, on the crossing from Naupactus, and in return they agreed to give him, at his request, the land of Elis. He names him otherwise, as Oxylus, son of Haemon, the son of Thoas, the Thoas who had helped the sons of Atreus destroy the empire of Priam; from Thoas back to Aetolus, son of Endymion, he reckons six generations.3
The choice of an Aetolian was no accident, for the kings of Aetolia and the Heraclids were kin: the mothers of Thoas, son of Andraemon, and of Hyllus, son of Heracles, were sisters. As for Oxylus' exile, it fell to him to be an outlaw from Aetolia because, throwing the quoit, he missed the mark and committed unintentional homicide; the man he killed by the quoit was, according to one account, his own brother Thermius.4
When the Eleans and Aetolians agreed to decide the land by single combat, the Elean archer Degmenus faced the Aetolian slinger Pyraechmes. Pyraechmes won, and Oxylus got the kingdom of Elis; he let the old inhabitants, the Epeans, keep their possessions, only settling Aetolian colonists among them and granting them a share in the land.5
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