

These two brothers are said to have distinguished themselves as architects, especially in building temples and palaces. Among others, they built a temple of Apollo at Delphi, and a treasury of Hyrieus, king of Hyria in Boeotia.2 The Scholiast on Aristophanes3 gives a somewhat different account from Charax, and makes them build the treasury for king Augeas. The story about this treasury in Pausanias bears a great resemblance to that which Herodotus4 relates of the treasury of the Egyptian king Rhampsinitus.


A tradition mentioned by Cicero,6 states that Agamedes and Trophonius, after having built the temple of Apollo at Delphi, prayed to the god to grant them in reward for their labor what was best for men. The god promised to do so on a certain day, and when the day came, the two brothers died.

The question as to whether the story about the Egyptian treasury is derived from Greece, or whether the Greek story was an importation from Egypt, has been answered by modern scholars in both ways; but Müller7 has rendered it very probable that the tradition took its rise among the Minyans, was transferred from them to Augeas, and was known in Greece long before the reign of Psammitichus, during which the intercourse between the two countries was opened.

Cp. Biton and Cleobis.



  1. Pausanias. Description of Greece viii, 4.5, 5.3.
  2. ibid. ix, 37.3; Strabo. Geography ix, 421.
  3. Clouds, 508.
  4. ii, 121.
  5. Pausanias. Description of Greece ix, 39.4; compare Dictionary of Antiquities, 673.
  6. Tusculan Disputations i, 47; comp. Plutarch. De Consolatio ad Apollonium, 14.
  7. Orchomenos und die Minyer, p. 94 ff.


