Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Among those bound by Tyndareus’s oath was Odysseus of Ithaca. An oracle (or his own foresight) had warned that if he went to Troy he would return only after many years, alone and in wretchedness. When Menelaus and Agamemnon’s recruiters came—Palamedes son of Nauplius prominent among them—Odysseus pretended to be mad. He yoked mismatched animals to a plow (an ox and an ass) and sowed salt in his fields, playing the lunatic so that the oath might not claim him. Palamedes saw through the act. He seized the infant Telemachus from Penelope’s arms and set the child in the path of the plow. Odysseus turned the team aside rather than kill his son—and so proved his sanity. Bound by the exposed ruse and by the oath, Odysseus joined the expedition. From this hour dated his hatred of Palamedes, which cyclic poetry would later repay with a false-treason plot and Palamedes’s stoning—but that revenge is a separate wartime entry. Here the unit is recruitment: cunning against cunning, the child as test, and Ithaca’s king forced into the Trojan muster.