THE STORY OF PALAMEDES
There is one hero of the Cyclic Ionian poems, at least of the Cypria, whose story illustrates the depth and width of the gulf which severs Ionia from the Iliad and Odyssey. The Cypria, like the Attic traditions used by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the Sophists, such as Gorgias, displays a strange hatred of Homer's favourite hero, the taker of the city, Odysseus. He, in most of the plays where he appears, is a peculiarly mean character: in the Iliad he is as noble and resolute as he is sagacious: in the Odyssey he is ruse, because his desperate situation, alone in a throng of foes, requires cunning. Only Agamemnon once, in one of his tempers, accused Odysseus of "evil wiles" (Iliad, iv. 339). Professor Mahaffy has offered an explanation of "the degradation of Odysseus" (and of other Homeric heroes) "in Greek literature" very different from that which I shall venture to suggest.[1] Mr. Mahaffy thinks that "the Attic standard of morality, the standard of Aeschylus and Euripides ... was higher and not lower than that of the Ionic court poets, and that the degradation of the Homeric heroes was partly owing to a moral advance, and not a moral decay, in the Greek nation." But what has Homer to do with the morality of Ionic court poets, about whom we have no information, unless the Cyclic poets were court poets? In Mr. Mahaffy's opinion, the Sicilian Epicharmus began the attacks on "Odysseus the Knave." "At all epochs and among all Greeks, lying and dishonesty were prominent vices." Certainly they were in historic times. Traitors were too well known to historic Greece, but Homer seems never to have heard of treachery. Odysseus has his ruses in the Odyssey, and therefore, Mr. Mahaffy thinks, the Greeks, knowing their own weak point, falseness, attacked it through Odysseus. Epicharmus began the assault, Pindar followed Epicharmus, and, in the Nemean Odes, vii. viii., belittled Odysseus (all in the interests of honesty), while Sophocles in the Philoctetes carries on the crusade.
It did not occur to Mr. Mahaffy that the crusade began, long before Epicharmus and Pindar, in the Ionian Cypria. In the Nemean Odes, vii. viii., Pindar naturally belittled Odysseus, to whom were awarded the arms of Achilles, which the hero, Aias, desired to win. Athens always claimed Aias as a friend and ally, wherefore, and in pursuance, as we shall see, of the feud of Palamedes, Attic poets favoured Aias and maligned his successful rival. They also backed Philoctetes against these "tyrants," the Atridae; they had no grudge against Achilles, though they could not represent his chivalry. Mr. Mahaffy does not mention Palamedes at all, does not see that the Athenians take up the Ionian grudge, and is "somewhat impatient of all the fashionable enthusiasm about Homer's grace, and refinement, and delicacy of feeling."
It is to Ionia, and not, primarily, to the advanced morality of republican Athens, morality certainly not Homeric, that we must trace the degradation of Odysseus in the literature of later Greece and of Rome. Ionia followed the example of the base-born Thersites (Iliad, ii. 220). The true cause of this degradation is that Ionia possessed, in Palamedes, a hero infinitely wiser, braver, and more learned and inventive than Odysseus, and that the death of this very perfect knight, of whom Homer never says a word, is attributed to the jealousy and cruelty of the Ithacan, and of his chosen companion-in-arms, Diomede. All this appeared in the Cypria, and, later, Attic wits perhaps improved on the story, and implicated the Atridae and the whole Achaean host, as well as Odysseus, in the guilt of maligning, falsely accusing, condemning, and stoning Palamedes. It was to punish this collective guilt, we shall see, that Zeus, in the Cypria, detached Achilles from the Achaean cause.
Manifestly all this tale, known to us first in the Cypria, is un-Achaean and un-Homeric, and the question arises, did Homer know the story? If he did, and if he believed it, he deliberately chose to ignore it, and to represent Odysseus and Diomede in the most favourable light. But did Homer know about Palamedes; when Homer sang had Palamedes his place in the Trojan "saga"? I think not, for reasons to be given. To understand the subject, we must examine what remains of the tale of Palamedes as found in the fragments and epitome of the Cypria, and then consider the later expansions and additions.
The Cypria takes Menelaus to Crete before Helen's abduction; and in the legend as arranged in a late age in the prose of Dictys Cretensis (made in the first or second century A.D.), Agamemnon also is in Crete, with Palamedes, son of Clymene and Nauplius of Nauplia, on business connected with the inheritance of Atreus. How far Dictys follows the Cypria, how far he works here on other legends, and how far he invents, it is not easy to be certain. The Cypria certainly yielded the fact that, when Helen eloped, Menelaus was not at home, but in Crete. Probably the Cypria explained why he went thither.[2] The real hero of Dictys and, I suggest, of the Cypria is Palamedes, a character unknown to or ignored by Homer, but of high importance in post-Homeric Ionian and Athenian poetry. In all of these Palamedes is the best man in council and in the field, and is the victim of Odysseus (a very base scoundrel) and of the Atridae. It is clear that Palamedes occupied a prominent place in the Cypria, for a "part or rhapsody" in it "appears to have borne the special title of Palamedeia."[3]
This rhapsody must have contained much information which is not preserved in the summary of the Cypria. About Palamedes we learn no more from the brief epitome and scanty fragments of the Cypria than that (1) he detected and unmasked the feigned madness of Odysseus, when he tried to shirk the summons to the Trojan war; (2) that Palamedes was treacherously drowned, when angling, by the Homeric companions-in-arms, Odysseus and Diomede. (3) According to the Cypria, the Achaean host, once landed in Asia, was perishing for lack of supplies, but Palamedes brought to the camp the three fairy daughters of the Delian priest of Apollo, who magically produced corn, wine, and oil.[4] This silly Märchen about the fairy gifts of the three girls could never have been introduced into an Epic by Homer, but it is quite in the manner of the Cyclics.
According to the account of Trojan matters in prose, by the Greek rhetorician, the pseudo-Dictys Cretensis, who rationalises everything, Palamedes was successful as head of the Commissariat, and obtained supplies when Odysseus failed. This is merely Dictys' way of narrating the Märchen of the girls with fairy gifts, and it was in jealousy of Palamedes' success that Odysseus, aided by Diomede, slew the hero, according to Dictys, treacherously, in the manner of the Märchen of Jean de l'Ours. According to Dictys, Odysseus and Diomede persuaded the guileless Palamedes that there was a hoard of gold at the bottom of a pit, induced him to descend thither, and then threw down stones and slew him. This is not, as we shall see, the Attic tradition, though in that, also, there is a fatal hoard of gold, and Palamedes is slain by stoning.
The Athenian tragedians either improved on the story in the Cypria, or found another legend, according to which Palamedes was treacherously accused of treachery, was tried, condemned, and stoned by the Achaean host: Odysseus being the contriver of the conspiracy. Thus Socrates, in the Apologia, is made by Plato to say that in the next world he hopes to meet Palamedes, and the Telamonian Aias, and others who died by an unjust judgment.[5]
Each of the three great Attic tragedians wrote a play on Palamedes; and Virgil makes Sinon speak of his unjust betrayal and death.[6] Aias, in Quintus Smyrnaeus, brands Odysseus with his guilt in the matter: "Thou didst destroy the divine Palamedes, far thy superior in strength and in counsel."[7] The current Athenian story was that Odysseus contrived to have an arrow, with a letter attached to it, shot towards Palamedes; that Odysseus got possession of the letter, forged by himself but purporting to be addressed by Priam, to Palamedes. Priam thanked him for his services as a spy, and promised a gift of gold. This gold was then hidden by Odysseus in the hut of Palamedes, and then discovered by him who hid it.[8] Agamemnon was implicated in the job.
In the Palamedes of Euripides the hero is not unavenged. His brother Oiax writes the shameful story of the Achaean treachery and cruelty, which ruined and destroyed Palamedes, on a number of pinakes, or tablets, like that which contained the fatal letter of Proetus in the Iliad. These tablets Oiax threw into the sea; some of them drifted to Nauplia, and the friends of Palamedes, by altering the guiding beacons on the Greek coast, caused the shipwreck and death of many Achaeans on their homeward way.[9]
Manifestly the whole scope of this Ionian and Attic favourite, the story of Palamedes, is non-Achaean, and was not likely to be known to Homer.
In Dictys, Palamedes is the true hero, and on every occasion takes the lead; while Odysseus, the scoundrel, is an inveterate forger of letters. By forged letters he induced Clytaemnestra to send Iphigeneia to marry Achilles at Aulis, his real purpose being to have her sacrificed to Artemis. In the Cypria, Iphigeneia is sent, on a false and foolish pretence of marriage, to Aulis; whether or not, in the Cypria, Odysseus managed the plot by forged letters, as in Dictys, we do not know.
Through Dictys and through Virgil the Palamedes legend reached the poets and romancers of the Middle Ages: there is even a Palamedes, a paynim knight, at Arthur's court. Thus in Roman times, and much more in the long mediaeval period of Homer's eclipse, Odysseus, Diomede, and the Atridae were under a cloud, Ionian in origin, and Athenian. The Ionians being "Pelasgians of the seacoast" (at least in the opinion of Herodotean Greece), and Palamedes being a man of Nauplia, on the sea, while the town was leagued with Athens, in the amphictyony of Calauria, he was naturally a favourite of Ionian and Athenian poets. In him they had a hero, the wisest and best, who perished from Achaean envy of his greatness.
Now, did Homer know anything of Nauplia and of Palamedes? Was this legend current in his time? If so, he ignored it, as Achaean poetry ignores all things Ionian. It was necessary for the Ionian poets to kill Palamedes just before the opening of the Iliad, for into that epic they could neither foist him nor anything that was theirs. In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Palamedes is fighting hard in what answers to the Iliadic battle of Book xi.
I am inclined under correction to suppose that Palamedes was originally no warrior under Ilios, but a Culture Hero of the "Pelasgians of the seacoasts," the Culture Hero of a fairly advanced civilisation. He was credited with the discovery of written characters,[10] or, at least, of a syllabary; or he taught the Greeks to use Phoenician characters in the Ionian alphabet. He also discovered arithmetic, Weights and Measures; Astronomy; the reckoning of Time; military discipline,—with post-Homeric centurions;—sentinels, fire-signals; a number of games, such as draughts, and so forth. Homer knows nothing of such Culture Heroes in the Achaean camp, where they are manifestly out of place.
It has been suggested that Palamedes is Palamaon, an ancient understudy of Hephaestus; παλάμημα being τέχνη, art, or handicraft, and πάλαμις the Salaminian equivalent of τεχνίτης. Palamedes is properly "the Inventor." I suggest that, in the mixed multitude of Ionia, poets were found who simply inserted the old Culture Hero among the Achaean heroes, and asserted his supremacy in counsel and in war; while, as has been said, it was impossible to bring him into the Iliad, so he was made the martyr of the jealousy of Homer's bravest and wisest Achaeans at the moment just before the Iliad begins. In the opinion of Socrates, Aias, no less than Palamedes, was the victim of an unjust verdict, a belief which he never found in Homer. But Aias was claimed as an ally and neighbour of Athens; Palamedes was of a seacoast city allied with Athens; both heroes, therefore, were useful links between the Ionians and Attica and the Trojan affair, in which, as in the legendary affairs of Thebes and Calydon, the Ionians had no part, except what they invented for themselves.
They imposed their version on Rome and on the Middle Ages, but we repeat, they could not get a reference to Palamedes into the Iliad. Among all its alleged borrowings from the Cyclics, the Iliad never borrowed a hint of Palamedes.[11]
After thus examining what is known about Palamedes, we ask, is it more probable that the Cypria is older than the Iliad, and based on a totally different Achaean tradition about events and heroes; or is the Cypria later than the Iliad, and even intended as a kind of antidote to that epic? One thing is clear, the Cypria is Ionian, not Achaean, if human sacrifice is Ionian rather than Achaean. Students who think the Cypria the older poem might perhaps argue thus: Many of the mixed peoples who made up the Ionians had ancestors at the Trojan war. Among these were Minyans, Boeotians, and Cretans. Their legends may have had an Achaean version of events which was not Homer's version, but was hostile to Odysseus, Diomede, and the Atridae. This version, Ionised, is given in the Cypria. Probably this version was continued (though we have no such continuation) from the resolve of Zeus to punish the host for the death of Palamedes: and the subsequent account, in this version of the war, would take no notice of the Wrath of Achilles about Briseis. Or, if that were assumed as the cause of the Wrath, Zeus embroiled Achilles and Agamemnon without any prayer from Thetis. Probably in this version, as in Dictys, Achilles was in love with Polyxena, and was treacherously slain while wooing her. This is the statement of the scholiast on Lycophron, and of Dictys, though it is contrary to the Cyclic Aethiopis, which follows the Iliad; Paris and Apollo slew Achilles, as Hector prophesied, in the Scaean gate. On this theory Polyxena was sacrificed to the dead Achilles precisely because they loved each other.
Thus the theory might go on, explaining that this Achaean version (wholly unknown to us), with Palamedes and all, was crushed by the supreme popularity of a later poem, the Iliad, but lived in an underground way till it revived, very late, in Lycophron, Dictys, and the rest. The details of ghosts, human sacrifices, hero-worship, and purification by blood (all un-Homeric), will be genuinely old Achaean, merely suppressed by some persons of taste who, later, "edited" the Iliad. In this case these details of religion were common to the Achaeans and the earlier populations, not peculiar to "the conquered races." They are Achaean, but were expurgated by the makers of our Homer, why, and when, and how, I do not conjecture.
I have here invented as coherent a hypothesis as I can imagine to account for Palamedes consistently with the theory that the Cypria is older than the Iliad. But the fact that Palamedes, "the inventor," is clearly, in origin, a Culture Hero, like Prometheus and Daedalus, does to me seem fatal to the hypothesis which I have sketched. If he had been, originally, just another such warrior as Achilles or Idomeneus, popular fancy would never have converted him into a being who won men from savagery and invented arts and sciences.
[1] Hermathena, vol. i. p. 265 et seqq.
[2] Kinkel, p. 17.
[3] Mure, History of Greek Literature, vol. ii. p. 281, citing Düntzer, p. 15. Welcker, Ep. Cycl., pt. i. p. 459.
[4] Schol. ad Lycophr, 570 sqq.; cf. Sophocles's Palamedes, Fr. 438. N2. Cypria, Kinkel, pp. 20, 30.
[5] Plato, Apologia, 41 B. Compare Scholion to Euripides, Orestes, 432.
[6] Aeneid, ii. 81.
[7] Post-Homerica, v. 198.
[8] Servius on Aeneid, ii. 81. Hyginus fr. Fab. 105.
[9] Scholiast, Aristoph. Thesmophor. 768.
[10] Stesichorus, Fr. 4 B. Schol. Eurip., Orestes, 432. Euripides, Palamedes, Fr. 578, N.
[11] For the learning about Palamedes, see Roscher's Lexikon, s.v. Palamedes.