Palamedes

A son of Nauplius

Palamedes was a Greek hero, one of the Achaeans who fought at Troy. The ancient writer Apollodorus makes him one of the three sons of Nauplius, with his brothers Oeax and Nausimedon. The ancient name of the city of Nafplio recalls the name of his father.

The stories about Palamedes do not keep him at home. They take him to Ithaca, then to Troy, and to his death there. He was remembered for a particular kind of cleverness. He could see through a deception, and later writers credited him with practical inventions, including dice and letters of the alphabet.

How he exposed Odysseus

When the Greeks gathered for the war against Troy, Odysseus of Ithaca did not want to go. He pretended to be mad. In Apollodorus’s account, Palamedes saw through the act. He took the baby Telemachus from his mother Penelope and drew a sword, as though he meant to kill the child. Odysseus dropped the pretence to save his son and went to war.

A better-known version puts Telemachus in front of a plough. That is not what the surviving text of Apollodorus says. His test is direct and brutal. Palamedes creates a danger that a father pretending to be mad cannot ignore. The episode shows his intelligence, and it gives Odysseus the grudge that later tradition holds against him.

The letter and the buried gold

At Troy, the man who uncovered one deception was destroyed by another. Apollodorus says Odysseus forced a Phrygian prisoner to write a letter that seemed to come from Priam of Troy and made Palamedes appear to be a traitor. Odysseus buried gold in Palamedes’s quarters and dropped the letter in the Greek camp.

The Greek leader Agamemnon read the letter, found the gold and handed Palamedes over to the allied army. They stoned him to death. In this account Palamedes makes no successful defence, and none of the commanders who fought beside him steps in. Forged writing and planted gold carry more weight than his good name.

The story is especially cruel because letters were among the inventions later credited to Palamedes. A skill linked with memory and communication becomes the means of false evidence against him. Apollodorus does not say this himself, but both traditions were known in the ancient world, and they sit uneasily together.

What ancient writers say he invented

The Greek traveller Pausanias records a temple of the goddess Fortune at Argos. It was said to hold the dice that Palamedes invented and dedicated there. Pausanias adds a doubt: the temple would have to be very old if it were truly the same building. He reports the local claim without treating it as proof.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder gives another, disputed history of invention. In his account, Cadmus brings 16 letters from Phoenicia, Palamedes adds four during the Trojan War, and the poet Simonides later adds four more. Pliny then notes a different scheme credited to the philosopher Aristotle. Ancient writers did not agree on the history of the alphabet. Palamedes appears again and again wherever they tried to give an invention a heroic author.

So the dice and the letters are claims made about him, not certain events in a life. The account of his death is just as much a tradition, and its details vary in other sources. What holds the figure together is one kind of intelligence. He spots a performance, he is credited with systems that order play and speech, and he is brought down by a system of false signs.

The name above Nafplio

Palamidi rises directly above Nafplio. The hill takes its name from Palamedes, son of Nauplius. The walls that stand on it now are much later. Venetian engineers built the fortress in the early eighteenth century.

The name belongs to the hill and has been handed down with it. The fortress does not claim to be a surviving palace or shrine of the hero. Compared with the myth it is modern, but the hill’s name keeps the hero, and the city below keeps the name of his father. Palamedes is remembered there through the name of the ground itself, not through any object said to come from Troy.