PALAMEDES

This article appears in Volume V20, Page 594 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: PAI-PAS

PALAMEDES , in Greek legend, son of Nauplius king of Euboea, one of the heroes of the Trojan War, belonging to the post-Homeric cycle of legends. During the siege of Troy, Agamemnon,

Diomedes

DIOMEDES

and Odysseus (who had been detected by Palamedes in an attempt to escape going to Troy by shamming madness) caused a

letter

LETTER (through Fr. lettre from Lat. littera or litera, letter of the
alphabet
- ALPHABET (see also WRITING)
; the origin of the Latin word is obscure; it has probably no connexion with the root of linere, to smear, i.e. with wax, for an inscription with a stilus)

containing money and purporting to come from Priam to be concealed in his tent. They then accused Palamedes of treasonable correspondence with the enemy, and he was ordered to be stoned to death. His father exacted a fearful vengeance from the Greeks on their way

home

, by placing false lights on the promontory of Caphareus. The story of Palamedes was first handled in the Cypria of Stasinus, and formed the subject of lost plays by Aeschylus (Palamedes), Sophocles (Nauplius), Euripides (Palamedes), of which some fragments remain. Sophists and rhetoricians, such as Gorgias and

Alcidamas

ALCIDAMAS

, amused themselves by writing declamations in favour of or against him. Palamedes was regarded as the inventor of the

alphabet

ALPHABET (see also WRITING)

, lighthouses, weights and

measures

MEASURES

, dice,

backgammon

BACKGAMMON

and the discus.
See Euripides, Orestes, 432 and schol.; Ovid, Metam. xiii. 56; Servius on Virgil, Aeneid, ii. 82, and

Nettleship

's note in Conington's edition;

Philostratus

PHILOSTRATUS

, Heroica, 11; Euripides, Frag. 581; for different versions of his death see Dictys Cretensis 1i. 15; Pausanias ii. 20, 3; X. 31, 2; Dares Phrygius, 28; monograph by O. Jahn (Hamburg, 1836).

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