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.