THE STORY OF PALAMEDES

Themanie cycliqueinserted

Agrios|Thersites, for it was desired to tell what became of Thersites; and—not to lose sight of a person so notable as Thersites—the poet made Achilles kill him, a much older man than Achilles, for his mockery. Then Diomede (who does not remonstrate when Odysseus calls him the basest, socially, of the host, and beats him) takes up his feud when he is slain.[35]

Homer has plainly no idea that Thersites is of royal and divine lineage, all that is a later invention of "the cyclic mania," and is as old, at least, as the age of the Ionian cyclic poet of theAethiopis.[36]The very scholiastssaid that Homer marked the base birth of Thersites by saying nothing about his parentage and home.

In Homer, as in the earliestChansons de Geste, there is the knightly poetic legend; and in the Cyclics, at least in the case of Thersites, there are the later expansions and continuations made under the influence ofla manie cyclique. Thedénouementof theTelegonia, the last of the Cyclics, is purely absurd. Telegonus marries his aged stepmother, Penelope, and Telemachus marries his father's mistress, Circe!

To explore the relations of Homer and of "saga" toMärchen, or popular tales, attached to real or fabulous heroes and heroines of the past, would require a volume.[37]Almost all Greek pseudo-historical tradition consists of a string ofMärchen, known all over the world: any student of folk-lore who reads the Achaean legends in Grote can identify the masterlessMärchenwhich have been attached to the heroic figures. In exactly the same way,Märchenare attached to Charlemagne in theChansons de Geste; to Arthur in the romances; and we might as well look to them for political and personal history as to Homer. Naimes, Ganelon, Olivier, the expedition of Charlemagne to Constantinople, his wars with the Saracens, and other persons and events in theChansons de Geste, yield no material to the historian; nor do Lancelot, Galahad, Palamedes, and Tristram, and Arthur's foreign conquests in the romances. What history there is rests obscure.

On the other hand, an attempt has recently been made to extract some grains of "tribal" history, before and after the Achaean migration to Asia, from the namesof the heroes in theIliad, and from the places where, in post-Homeric Greece, they received worship. This effort is made by Dr. Erich Bethe, in hisHomer und die Heldensage, and Mr. Murray follows Bethe inThe Rise of the Greek Epic. We may take a notable example of the method in the case of Hector. "Hector seems to belong to Boeotia." It may be worth while to examine the reasoning on which this most unexpected opinion is based. The idea was first propounded by Ferdinand Dümmler in a shortAnhangto Studniczka'sCyrene."Hector was worshipped as a hero in Boeotian Thebes," says Mr. Murray, quoting Dümmler, and Dümmler's source is apparently Pausanias.[38]If the Boeotians in the time of Pausanias regarded Hector as of Boeotian birth, the fact would be curious. But they did nothing of the kind. "The Thebans show the tomb of Hector near the Well of Oedipous. They say that Hector's remains were brought here from Ilium in accordance with the following oracle: "Ye Thebans, if you wish your country to be wealthy, bring to your city from Asia the bones of Hector the son of Priam, and respect the hero at the bidding of Zeus."[39]

This was a real or animaginarycase of the body-snatching of which Herodotus speaks frequently. The relics of St. Hector would be valuable to Thebes. The Thebans, in fact, may have wished to propitiate a hero who had slain, according to Homer, many Boeotians in battle, and who might still be hostile, and even fight against them in battle, as dead heroes were apt to do. Pausanias (ix. 4. 3, ix. 39. 3) mentions also the graves of certain Boeotian heroes, one of them wounded, the other slain by Hector, as still honoured in Boeotia. Hector slew, or wounded, or fought Homeric heroes from Phocis and from Boeotia; and Epeigeus, a suppliant of Peleus (Iliad, xvi. 570et seqq.), and an Aetolian hero, an Athenian, a Mycenaean, an Elian, and so on.What follows? These names of heroes slain by Hector, Thessalians, Aetolians, Phocians, and Boeotians, are thought to suggest that, as Mr. Murray translates Dr. Bethe, "Hector, or rather the tribe which honoured Hector as their hero, migrated by this road,"—by the road on which these Aetolians, Thessalians, Phocians, and Boeotians—or the tribes which honoured them as heroes—used to live. "More accurately, the tribe gradually, in how many centuries none can tell, moved in a south-easterly direction, driven by a pressure which was no doubt exerted by the Aeolic tribe represented in the Epos by Achilles." "These are no pictures of phantasy that I let loose to play about here," says Dr. Bethe (p. 16).

What else but phantasies can we possibly call them? That Hector's tomb was shown in Thebes, does by no means prove that he, or a tribe which was the Hector tribe, once lived in Boeotia. Heroes, like saints, had tombs and chapels in many regions where they were not born, and which they never visited. The grave of St. James was shown—in Spain! Ariadne's ashes had been shown in Argos. Hector, in theIliad, killed the men in his way. In addition to the victims chosen out by Dr. Bethe, he slew Stichios, an Athenian; Amphimachus, an Elian, and Periphetes of Mycenae.[40]

This does no more prove that Hector was a Boeotian than that he was an Athenian. He slew Schedios, a Phocian, yet he was no more a Phocian than an Athenian, he merely killed the men whom he met. If we are to argue, that he or the tribe which honoured him was driven out of Aetolia and Thessaly down to Boeotia, Phocis, and Attica, we must, by parity of reasoning, argue that the Hector tribe (in Gaelic, the MacEachans), were driven into Peloponnesus, to Mycenae and Elis, for Hector slew Periphetes of Mycenae, and Amphimachus, of Elis.[41]The Mycenaean, Elian, and Athenian are notmentioned by Dr. Bethe. Nor can Hector be converted into a Boeotian by the circumstance that he fought a kind of courteous duel with Aias, while Aias was really the Locrian Aias, we are told, and so a neighbour of the Boeotian Hector.[42]Hector's relations with Aias[43]are far from neighbourly and friendly.

This instance of Hector is one of many in which the names of heroes are taken to represent "tribes" which had a cult of these heroes, though Homer knows nothing about this cult as practised in heroic Greece, except in Athens. We learn nothing from Homer about "tribes" or clans with a sacred eponymous hero, or with any "hero" in the sense of the word as used in the Greece of history. We cannot assume that theIliadintroduces, in the combats of heroes, memories of tribal wars in Greece in the pre-Homeric age, and transfers them, in the shape of single combats, to the plain of Troy!

Heroic relationships were claimed long after Homer by peoples like the Dorians and Romans and English and many others, merely to connect themselves with the great legend of Troy; and the Greek cults of heroes, a religion unknown to Homer, were carried into regions with which Homer's men had no connection. We might as well look for Cymric tribal wars in the feuds and names of the knights in the Arthurian romances, or for Irish tribal feuds in the names of Ferdiad and Cuchullain, as for prehistoric migrations in the names of Hector, Leltus, Stichios of Attica, Periphetes of Mycenae, and Amphimachus of Elis.

"Hector," we are told, "was a great 'slayer of men,' and his victims in theIliadmake a sort of road from Thebes upward to the bounds of Achilles' region."[44]They also "make a sort of road" to Mycenae and Elis by way of Athens: that is the history of the tribe,preserved in the names of his victims,—names which, it appears, "are short" for defeated tribes. As for the evidence of a Helen tribe at Sparta, because Helen had a shrine and worship there, we have no evidence that the Achaeans had any heroic shrines or hero-worship,—the evidence is that they had none,—but the assumption is that Homer represents "another stream of history," and, apparently, that his people turned tribal names and tribal gods of an unknown past, into heroic men and women. The opposite theory is that the hero-worshipping people of historic Greece devoted themselves to such patron saints as they knew through Homer, as the Arabs have saints whom they know about through the Hebrew Scriptures.

I am not aware that in the bardic history, or "saga" of any people, tribes are spoken of under the names of their tribal heroes in such a way as to cause confusion. None is caused by Judah, Benjamin, Ephraim, and so on in the Old Testament, but in other Biblical cases there may be trouble. Localtribes, as far as I am aware, are nowhere named by patronymics; certainly they are not in Australia, India, America, and Africa, except, among the Zulus, by the name of a man plus Ama, AmaFinn, and so forth. Thus the theory that Hector is the name of a prehistoric Boeotian local tribe seems to me fantastic. We might as well look for remnants of tribal history in Kay, Gawaine, Naimes, and Ganelon.

Surely it is an error in historical method to reason as if pre-Homeric Greeks were as addicted to divinising men, building their shrines, and sacrificing to them, as the post-Homeric Greeks were in the seventh and all later centuries. We might as well argue that the apostolic Christians practised mediaeval saint-worship, and adored and built innumerable chapels to dead Saints, because this was the custom of mediaeval Christianity.

To sum up, we have proved that our Homer, in histreatment of old tradition, is a noble poet, that he stands aloof from all the others of Greece in his refusal (save in theOdyssey, a romance) to introduce the wild elements ofMärchen, the childish miracles; while he is equally remote from the methods of the pseudo-historians like Eumelus as known to us, and all the Hesiodic genealogisers and inventors of eponymous heroes; and from themanie cycliqueof the Ionian Cyclic poets. Really no fact can be more certain; and this fact, even if it were not corroborated by all the others, would prove our Homer to be "alone, aloof, sublime."

[1]Castren,Ethnol. Vorlesungen, pp. 164-169.

[2]Von Hahn,Griechische Märchen, 1.

[3]Pausanias, i. 19, ii. 34.

[4]Child,English and Scottish Ballads, vol. i., "Riddles wisely Answered."

[5]Yen. A.,Iliad, ii. 336. Rzach,Hesiod, p. 326.

[6]For many cases inMärchen, see Mr. Crookes'Folk-Lore, vol. xix. p. 156.

[7]Roscher'sLexikon, vol ii. p. 2594.

[8]R. G. E.pp. 161, 162.

[9]Textually, for, inIliad, vi. 200, 'Ἀλλ' ὄτε δὴ καὶ κεῑνος ἀπήχθετο πᾱσι θεοῑσιν (referring to Bellerophon), Mr. Murray renders, "But when he also was hated of all the gods," and asks, "Why the phrase, 'when he also'?" Homer is, "one may almost say, quoting from an existing poem." Now I understand Glaucus in this "he also" to refer to the remark of Diomede (vi. 140) on Lycurgus's being "hated of all the gods." He repeats the very words of Diomede. "Here is another man who, like Lycurgus inyourstory, washated of all the gods." Consulting Mr. Leaf's note (vi. 200), I find that this is also the opinion of Ameis: Mr. Leaf thinks it "too far-fetched." The distance is sixty lines (vi. 140-200). In his translation of the passage in Leaf, Lang, and Myers, Mr. Leaf translates, with Monro, "even he," even Bellerophon, whom the gods had loved. Surely no textual quotations by Homer from the so-called "Eumelus" need be imagined.

[10]R. G. E.pp. 164, 165.

[11]Pausanias, I. I.

[12]Ibid.iv. 4. 1.

[13]Frazer,Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 2, citing Clemens,Strom. i. 398, ed. Potter.

[14]Eumelus in Kinkel, p. 188.

[15]Pausanias, ii. 3. 10.

[16]Pausanias, ii. i. i.

[17]Ibid. ii. 3. 10, 11.

[18]"Medea," Reseller'sLexikon, ii. 2. 2492.

[19]Seeliger, Roscher'sLexikon, ii. 2. 2496.

[20]Roscher,Lexikon, vol. i. 342.

[21]Iliad, vi. 171.

[22]"Pegasus is omitted by Homer as a monster," Mr. Murray justly observes (R. G. E. p. 162, note I). No other poet omitted "monsters"; not Pindar for one, or Hesiod.

[23]R. G. E. p. 163.

[24]Theogony, 956-962.

[25]Odyssey, x. 137.

[26]Odyssey, xii. 57-62.

[27]Theogony, 1011-1015.

[28]Roscher,Lexikon, vol. i. pp. 108, 109.

[29]Mimnermus, Fragment 11. Bergk.

[30]Argonautica, iii. 309 ff.

[31]Iliad, vii. 468, 469, xxi. 41, xxiii. 747.

[32]Pythian Odes, iv.

[33]R. G. E.pp. 185, 186. All this comes from theAethiopis, orSack of Ilios, followed by Chairemon in his tragedy,Achilles Thersitoctonos, with scholia on the Philoctetes (445), Quintus Smyrnaeus (of the fourth century a.d.). Dictys Cretensis, the prose compiler of the second century a.d., does not mention Thersites.

[34]do not enter into the theory of his relations (1) to thepharmakos, driven out of Athens as a human scape-goat, and whipped, perhaps sacrificed; or (2) with Theritas, a name of Ares in Laconia, according to Pausanias. Homer in his Achaean way never alludes to the cruel and lewd, or magical affair of thepharmakos.

[35]Iliad, ii. 246-248. "I deem that no baser-born man (χερειότερον) came with Agamemnon." χερειότερον "virtually = χερείονα, see Iliad, i. 80" (Leaf), where a king is contrasted with ἀνδρὶ χέρηῑ, "a meaner man" (Leaf, in Leaf, Lang, Myers,The Iliad, p. 3).

[36]The Cyclic story also demonstrates its un-Homeric origin by dragging in "the hocus-pocus of purification" (R. G. E.p. 134). But Usener, seeing, in Sir Walter Scott's words, "further into a millstone than the nature of the millstone permits," makes Thersites = Theritas = Enyalios (Hesychius), and suggests that two sacrifices by Spartan lads to Enyalius and Achilles, after a fight with fisticuffs, and ducking of the vanquished, may be "the ritual form of the old battle of Achilles and Thersites" =(?) "the common annual rites of the slaying of Winter by Summer, or of one vegetation god by another" (R. G. E. pp. 186, 187). There was not much of a "battle" between Thersites and Achilles! The millstone, really, has a hole through it. To Homer, Thersites is a nobody. His rank, relationships, and fate are due to the later "Cyclic mania," and to "poetic justice."

[37]Will nobody write it?

[38]R. G. E.p. 196.

[39]Pausanias, ix. 18

[40]Iliad, xiii. 185, xv. 329, 638.

[41]xv. 636-644.

[42]Bethe, p. 15.

[43]Iliad, xiii. 801-832 andpassim.

[44]R. G. E. p. 197.

There is one hero of the Cyclic Ionian poems, at least of theCypria, whose story illustrates the depth and width of the gulf which severs Ionia from theIliadandOdyssey. TheCypria, 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 theIliadhe is as noble and resolute as he is sagacious: in theOdysseyhe isruse, 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 theOdyssey, 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 thePhiloctetescarries on the crusade.

It did not occur to Mr. Mahaffy that the crusade began, long before Epicharmus and Pindar, in the IonianCypria. 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 jealousyand cruelty of the Ithacan, and of his chosen companion-in-arms, Diomede. All this appeared in theCypria,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 theCypria, detached Achilles from the Achaean cause.

Manifestly all this tale, known to us first in theCypria, 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 theCypria, and then consider the later expansions and additions.

TheCypriatakes 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 theCypria, how far he works here on other legends, and how far he invents, it is not easy to be certain. TheCypriacertainly yielded the fact that, when Helen eloped, Menelaus was not at home, but in Crete. Probably theCypriaexplained why he went thither.[2]The real hero of Dictys and, I suggest, of theCypriais Palamedes, a character unknown to or ignored by Homer, but of high importance in post-Homeric Ionian and Athenian poetry. In all ofthese 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 theCypria, for a "part or rhapsody" in it "appears to have borne the special title ofPalamedeia."[3]

This rhapsody must have contained much information which is not preserved in the summary of theCypria. About Palamedes we learn no more from the brief epitome and scanty fragments of theCypriathan 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 theCypria, 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 sillyMärchenabout 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 theMärchenof 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 theMärchenof Jean de l'Ours. According to Dictys, Odysseus and Diomedepersuaded 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 theCypria, 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 theApologia, 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 thePalamedesof Euripides the hero is not unavenged. His brother Oiax writes the shameful story of the Achaean treachery and cruelty, which ruinedand destroyed Palamedes, on a number ofpinakes,or tablets, like that which contained the fatal letter of Proetus in theIliad. 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 theCypria, Iphigeneia is sent, on a false and foolish pretence of marriage, to Aulis; whether or not, in theCypria, 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 allthings Ionian. It was necessary for the Ionian poets to kill Palamedes just before the opening of theIliad, for into that epic they could neither foist him nor anything that was theirs. In Shakespeare'sTroilus 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 beingτέχνη, art, or handicraft, andπάλαμιςthe 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 theIliad,so he was made the martyr of the jealousy of Homer's bravest and wisest Achaeans at the moment just before theIliadbegins. 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 theIliad. Among all its alleged borrowings from the Cyclics, theIliadnever borrowed a hint of Palamedes.[11]

After thus examining what is known about Palamedes, we ask, is it more probable that theCypriais older than theIliad, and based on a totally different Achaean tradition about events and heroes; or is theCyprialater than theIliad, and even intended as a kind of antidote to that epic? One thing is clear, theCypriais Ionian, not Achaean, if human sacrifice is Ionian rather than Achaean. Students who think theCypriathe 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 anAchaeanversion of events which was not Homer's version, but was hostile to Odysseus, Diomede, and the Atridae. This version, Ionised, is given in theCypria.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 CyclicAethiopis,which follows theIliad; 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 thatthisAchaean version (wholly unknown to us), with Palamedes and all, was crushed by the supreme popularity of a later poem, theIliad, 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" theIliad. In this case these details of religion were common to the Achaeans and the earlier populations,notpeculiar to "the conquered races." They are Achaean, but were expurgated by the makers ofourHomer, 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 theCypriais older than theIliad. 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. 265et 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. adLycophr, 570sqq.; cf. Sophocles'sPalamedes, 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 onAeneid, ii. 81. Hyginus fr.Fab. 105.

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