Herodotus, Histories 1.31.5 · 1.31.5
They never rose again
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Solon — μετὰ ταύτην δὲ τὴν εὐχὴν ὡς ἔθυσάν τε καὶ εὐωχήθησαν, κατακοιμηθέντες ἐν αὐτῷ τῷ ἱρῷ οἱ νεηνίαι οὐκέτι ἀνέστησαν ἀλλʼ ἐν τέλεϊ τούτῳ ἔσχοντο. Ἀργεῖοι δὲ σφέων εἰκόνας ποιησάμενοι ἀνέθεσαν ἐς Δελφοὺς ὡς ἀριστῶν γενομένων.
"After this prayer, when they had sacrificed and feasted, the young men fell asleep in the temple itself and never rose again; they were held in that end. The Argives made statues of them and dedicated them at Delphi, as men who had been the best of men."
Word by word
The setting
The prayer is answered, and the Argives set up statues of the brothers at Delphi.
A note on this passage
The death is told as sleep. After the sacrifice and the feast, the brothers lie down in the sanctuary and ouketi anestēsan, "no longer stood up." Then a phrase English struggles with: en telei toutōi eschonto, "they were held fast in this telos." Telos is an end, but also a completion, a fulfilment, even the rite of an initiation. Their lives did not stop so much as finish.
The last sentence is the kind of evidence Herodotus likes: the Argives set up statues of the pair at Delphi. Two archaic marble statues of young men, carved around 600 to 580 BC, were found at Delphi in 1893 and 1894, and an inscription on one base names a sculptor from Argos. Most scholars take them to be Cleobis and Biton, though some prefer the twin gods Castor and Polydeuces. They stand in the Delphi museum today.
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