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.