At this period of the war the Grecian army was deprived of Palamêdês, one of its ablest chiefs. Odysseus had not forgiven the artifice by which Palamêdês had detected his simulated insanity, nor was he without jealousy of a rival clever and cunning in a degree equal, if not superior, to himself; one who had enriched the Greeks with the invention of letters, of dice for amusement, of night-watches, as well as with other useful suggestions. According to the old Cyprian epic, Palamêdês was drowned while fishing, by the hands of Odysseus and Diomêdês.[713] Neither in the Iliad nor the Odyssey does the name of Palamêdês occur: the lofty position which Odysseus occupies in both those poems—noticed with some degree of displeasure even by Pindar, who described Palamêdês as the wiser man of the two—is sufficient to explain the omission.[714] But in the more advanced period of the Greek mind, when intellectual superiority came to acquire a higher place in the public esteem as compared with military prowess, the character of Palamêdês, combined with his unhappy fate, rendered him one of the most interesting personages in the Trojan legend. Æschylus, Sophoklês and Euripidês each consecrated to him a special tragedy; but the mode of his death as described in the old epic was not suitable to Athenian ideas, and accordingly he was represented as having been falsely accused of treason by Odysseus, who caused gold to be buried in his tent, and persuaded Agamemnôn and the Grecian chiefs that Palamêdês had received it from the Trojans.[715] He thus forfeited his life, a victim to the calumny of Odysseus and to the delusion of the leading Greeks. In the last speech made by the philosopher Socratês to his Athenian judges, he alludes with solemnity and fellow-feeling to the unjust condemnation of Palamêdês, as analogous to that which he himself was about to suffer, and his companions seem to have dwelt with satisfaction on the comparison. Palamêdês passed for an instance of the slanderous enmity and misfortune which so often wait upon superior genius.[716] [713] Argum. Cypr. 1. 1.; Pausan. x. 31. The concluding portion of the Cypria seems to have passed under the title of Παλαμηδεία (see Fragm. 16 and 18. p. 15, Düntz.; Welcker, Der Episch. Cycl. p. 459; Eustath. ad Hom. Odyss. i. 107). The allusion of Quintus Smyrnæus (v. 197) seems rather to point to the story in the Cypria, which Strabo (viii. p. 368) appears not to have read. [714] Pindar, Nem. vii. 21; Aristidês, Orat. 46. p. 260. [715] See the Fragments of the three tragedians, Παλαμήδης—Aristeidês, Or. xlvi. p. 260; Philostrat. Heroic. x.; Hygin. fab. 95-105. Discourses for and against Palamêdês, one by Alkidamas, and one under the name of Gorgias, are printed in Reiske’s Orr. Græc. t. viii. pp. 64, 102; Virgil, Æneid, ii. 82, with the ample commentary of Servius—Polyæn. Proœ. p. 6.