Palamedes seeks revenge

Abstract

An Attic black-figure neck amphora in the British Museum (Plate VId) depicts a winged warrior rushing to the right to overtake a ship that is sailing in the same direction. To the left a bird perches on a craggy rock. The winged warrior in this enigmatic scene should, I believe, be identified as the ghost of Palamedes, whose urgency in outracing the ship is dictated by his thirst for revenge. The name of Palamedes never appears in the Homeric epics. Most people, like Strabo, assume that this is because the story of Palamedes (and of his father Nauplios) was a creation of the poets of the later epic cycle and so was invented only after the composition of theIliadand theOdysseyhad been completed. Philostratos, however, suggested that Homerdidknow about Palamedes, but suppressed any mention of him because he wished to glorify Odysseus. For the story of Palamedes shed such discreditable light on Odysseus' character that the stain it left on the wily hero's reputation could never be effaced.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.