After thus examining what is known about Palamedes, we ask, is it more probable that the _Cypria_ is older than the _Iliad_, and based on a totally different Achaean tradition about events and heroes; or is the _Cypria_ later than the _Iliad_, and even intended as a kind of antidote to that epic? One thing is clear, the _Cypria_ is Ionian, not Achaean, if human sacrifice is Ionian rather than Achaean. Students who think the _Cypria_ the older poem might perhaps argue thus: Many of the mixed peoples who made up the Ionians had ancestors at the Trojan war. Among these were Minyans, Boeotians, and Cretans. Their legends may have had an _Achaean_ version of events which was not Homer's version, but was hostile to Odysseus, Diomede, and the Atridae. This version, Ionised, is given in the _Cypria._ Probably this version was continued (though we have no such continuation) from the resolve of Zeus to punish the host for the death of Palamedes: and the subsequent account, in this version of the war, would take no notice of the Wrath of Achilles about Briseis. Or, if that were assumed as the cause of the Wrath, Zeus embroiled Achilles and Agamemnon without any prayer from Thetis. Probably in this version, as in Dictys, Achilles was in love with Polyxena, and was treacherously slain while wooing her. This is the statement of the scholiast on Lycophron, and of Dictys, though it is contrary to the Cyclic _Aethiopis,_ which follows the _Iliad_; Paris and Apollo slew Achilles, as Hector prophesied, in the Scaean gate. On this theory Polyxena was sacrificed to the dead Achilles precisely because they loved each other. Thus the theory might go on, explaining that _this_ Achaean version (wholly unknown to us), with Palamedes and all, was crushed by the supreme popularity of a later poem, the _Iliad_, but lived in an underground way till it revived, very late, in Lycophron, Dictys, and the rest. The details of ghosts, human sacrifices, hero-worship, and purification by blood (all un-Homeric), will be genuinely old Achaean, merely suppressed by some persons of taste who, later, "edited" the _Iliad_. In this case these details of religion were common to the Achaeans and the earlier populations, _not_ peculiar to "the conquered races." They are Achaean, but were expurgated by the makers of _our_ Homer, why, and when, and how, I do not conjecture. I have here invented as coherent a hypothesis as I can imagine to account for Palamedes consistently with the theory that the _Cypria_ is older than the _Iliad_. But the fact that Palamedes, "the inventor," is clearly, in origin, a Culture Hero, like Prometheus and Daedalus, does to me seem fatal to the hypothesis which I have sketched. If he had been, originally, just another such warrior as Achilles or Idomeneus, popular fancy would never have converted him into a being who won men from savagery and invented arts and sciences. [1] _Hermathena_, vol. i. p. 265 _et seqq_. [2] Kinkel, p. 17.