Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Palamedes son of Nauplius, who had forced Odysseus to the war by placing the infant Telemachus in the path of the plow, became Odysseus’s enemy for that exposure. During the siege at Troy, Odysseus framed him for treason. In the common classical reconstruction (Apollodorus; tragic tradition reflecting the *Cypria*), Odysseus planted gold in Palamedes’ tent—or forged a letter as from Priam promising payment—and arranged that a Trojan captive or a planted Phrygian should be found with matching evidence. The army stoned Palamedes as a traitor, or he was drowned in a well while fishing (alternate). Diomedes is sometimes named as Odysseus’s accomplice in the planting. Proclus’s bare *Cypria* notice that Palamedes was drowned (or killed) is thus filled out by the framed-treason plot that explains Odysseus’s lifelong cunning stained by judicial murder. Nauplius, learning of his son’s death, sailed to the Greek camp to demand justice and was rebuffed; afterward he lit false beacons on Euboea’s Caphereus to wreck returning Achaean ships and, in some tales, corrupted the wives of the absent kings. Palamedes’ death therefore sits in the Cypria phase of the war as the first great internal crime of the Achaean host—revenge deferred until the nostoi.