There is yet another supposition open. Homer has told us that Phyleus was Διὶ φίλος,—a distinction he very rarely confers,—and that he migrated, as he implies rather than asserts, from Elis, on account of a quarrel with his father:
ὃς πότε Δουλίχιόν δ’ ἀπενάσσατο πατρὶ χολωθείς.
He does not mention the cause; but this abrupt allusion to the father of Phyleus implies that he was a person of note. Strabo[872] may therefore only be filling up a void in Homer, when he tells us, of course from some tradition, that Augeias was the father of Phyleus.
If this were so, we have to ask, why is not Phyleus an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν? and who, upon this supposition, could Euphetes be?
As we must infer from the Catalogue that the Elian kingdom of Augeias was broken up at the epoch of the Troica, and as in consequence we do not find Polyxeinus, his grandson, called by the title in question, so neither need we expect it of Phyleus.
If Phyleus was the son of Augeias, Euphetes cannot have been sovereign of the Elian Ephyre, for they would in this case not have been ξεῖνοι, but brothers.
But he might still have been sovereign either of the Ephyre mentioned by Homer, μυχῷ Ἄργεος, which appears as Corinth in the Catalogue: or possibly of the Thesprotian Ephyre with which we become acquainted in Strabo.
If Euphetes represented, with the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, one of the old Hellic chieftaincies at either of those places, nothing could be more natural than that the tie of hostship should subsist between him and Phyleus, the son of another Hellic chieftain of the same class.
In any case, though the Homeric evidence is palpably incomplete, yet by connecting the title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν with the highly characteristic local title of Ephyre, and the name of the river Selleeis, it unequivocally supports the interpretation of that title as one indicating an original and purely Hellic chieftaincy.