It is to Ionia, and not, primarily, to the advanced morality of republican Athens, morality certainly not Homeric, that we must trace the degradation of Odysseus in the literature of later Greece and of Rome. Ionia followed the example of the base-born Thersites (_Iliad,_ ii. 220). The true cause of this degradation is that Ionia possessed, in Palamedes, a hero infinitely wiser, braver, and more learned and inventive than Odysseus, and that the death of this very perfect knight, of whom Homer never says a word, is attributed to the jealousy and cruelty of the Ithacan, and of his chosen companion-in-arms, Diomede. All this appeared in the _Cypria,_ and, later, Attic wits perhaps improved on the story, and implicated the Atridae and the whole Achaean host, as well as Odysseus, in the guilt of maligning, falsely accusing, condemning, and stoning Palamedes. It was to punish this collective guilt, we shall see, that Zeus, in the _Cypria_, detached Achilles from the Achaean cause. Manifestly all this tale, known to us first in the _Cypria_, is un-Achaean and un-Homeric, and the question arises, did Homer know the story? If he did, and if he believed it, he deliberately chose to ignore it, and to represent Odysseus and Diomede in the most favourable light. But did Homer know about Palamedes; when Homer sang had Palamedes his place in the Trojan "saga"? I think not, for reasons to be given. To understand the subject, we must examine what remains of the tale of Palamedes as found in the fragments and epitome of the _Cypria_, and then consider the later expansions and additions. The _Cypria_ takes Menelaus to Crete before Helen's abduction; and in the legend as arranged in a late age in the prose of Dictys Cretensis (made in the first or second century A.D.), Agamemnon also is in Crete, with Palamedes, son of Clymene and Nauplius of Nauplia, on business connected with the inheritance of Atreus. How far Dictys follows the _Cypria_, how far he works here on other legends, and how far he invents, it is not easy to be certain. The _Cypria_ certainly yielded the fact that, when Helen eloped, Menelaus was not at home, but in Crete. Probably the _Cypria_ explained why he went thither.[2] The real hero of Dictys and, I suggest, of the _Cypria_ is Palamedes, a character unknown to or ignored by Homer, but of high importance in post-Homeric Ionian and Athenian poetry. In all of these Palamedes is the best man in council and in the field, and is the victim of Odysseus (a very base scoundrel) and of the Atridae. It is clear that Palamedes occupied a prominent place in the _Cypria_, for a "part or rhapsody" in it "appears to have borne the special title of _Palamedeia_."[3]