94 THE DELPHIAN TWINS
for there are only traces of and room for two or three letters in
the beginning of the name. But it is an Argive artist who
produced the Delphian twins, and in view of the heavy
build of the figures, it is quite natural that he should be
a forerunner of the Argive Polyclitus, who more than
one hundred years later created the vigorous Dorian male
ideal in art. The connexion of Argos with the artistic
tradition of Crete is handed down to us in literature in the
accounts of the two Daedalids, Dipoenus and Scyllis, who
lived about 570 B.c. and migrated to Argos. That explains
the Cretan mode of hair-dressing in the Argive twins.
From the same period, the second quarter of the sixth
century B.c., we have a female figure, found at Tegea in
the Peloponnese, with a head of hair that corresponds exactly;
now, according to the tradition, a third artist of the Cretan
school of Daedalus, Cheirisophus, migrated to Tegea.1
A Cretan wooden statue in Delphi, described by Pindar2 3
probably belonged to the same school, which, in the first half
of the sixth century, exercised a considerable influence on the
Peloponnesian and especially the Argive sculptors. Even
overseas, in Ionic Asia Minor, honourable commissions were
given in those times to Cretan artists. Thus it was that
two Cretan architects, Chersiphron and Metagenes, superin-
tended the construction of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus
in its first form at the beginning of the sixth century.’
But what do the Delphian twins represent < Homolle
had tentatively suggested the names of Cleobis and Biton,
but this hypothesis found no particular favour. Herodotus
gives us the following story about them (i. 31 if.): When
Croesus in Sardis asks Solon whom he regards as the
happiest of his contemporaries, to the annoyance of the king
the sage names not himself, but the Athenian Tellus, and
next to him Cleobis and Biton, sons of the priestess of Hera
at Argos. These young men, when one day the animals
for her carriage were not forthcoming and she was in
danger of being too late for the festival, harnessed them-
selves to the vehicle and drew their mother all the forty-five
1 Overbeck, SchriftqueUen, and 345. Statue from Tegea, Perrot-Chipiez,
viii. 430 f. and figs. 210-11. 2 Pyth., v. 40.
3 H. Brunn, Geschichte der griech. Kiinstler, 26.