In the _Palamedes_ of Euripides the hero is not unavenged. His brother Oiax writes the shameful story of the Achaean treachery and cruelty, which ruined and destroyed Palamedes, on a number of _pinakes,_ or tablets, like that which contained the fatal letter of Proetus in the _Iliad_. These tablets Oiax threw into the sea; some of them drifted to Nauplia, and the friends of Palamedes, by altering the guiding beacons on the Greek coast, caused the shipwreck and death of many Achaeans on their homeward way.[9] Manifestly the whole scope of this Ionian and Attic favourite, the story of Palamedes, is non-Achaean, and was not likely to be known to Homer. In Dictys, Palamedes is the true hero, and on every occasion takes the lead; while Odysseus, the scoundrel, is an inveterate forger of letters. By forged letters he induced Clytaemnestra to send Iphigeneia to marry Achilles at Aulis, his real purpose being to have her sacrificed to Artemis. In the _Cypria_, Iphigeneia is sent, on a false and foolish pretence of marriage, to Aulis; whether or not, in the _Cypria_, Odysseus managed the plot by forged letters, as in Dictys, we do not know. Through Dictys and through Virgil the Palamedes legend reached the poets and romancers of the Middle Ages: there is even a Palamedes, a paynim knight, at Arthur's court. Thus in Roman times, and much more in the long mediaeval period of Homer's eclipse, Odysseus, Diomede, and the Atridae were under a cloud, Ionian in origin, and Athenian. The Ionians being "Pelasgians of the seacoast" (at least in the opinion of Herodotean Greece), and Palamedes being a man of Nauplia, on the sea, while the town was leagued with Athens, in the amphictyony of Calauria, he was naturally a favourite of Ionian and Athenian poets. In him they had a hero, the wisest and best, who perished from Achaean envy of his greatness. Now, did Homer know anything of Nauplia and of Palamedes? Was this legend current in his time? If so, he ignored it, as Achaean poetry ignores all things Ionian. It was necessary for the Ionian poets to kill Palamedes just before the opening of the _Iliad_, for into that epic they could neither foist him nor anything that was theirs. In Shakespeare's _Troilus and Cressida_, Palamedes is fighting hard in what answers to the Iliadic battle of Book xi.