he Trojans within their walls,
Achilles attacked and stormed Lyrnessus, Pedasus, Lesbos, and other
places in the neighborhood, twelve towns on the sea-coast, and eleven in
the interior: he drove off the oxen of AEneas and pursued the hero
himself, who narrowly escaped with his life: he surprised and killed the
youthful Troilus, son of Priam, and captured several of the other sons,
whom he sold as prisoners into the islands of the AEgean. He acquired as
his captive the fair Briseis, while Chryseis was awarded to Agamemnon;
he was, moreover, eager to see the divine Helen, the prize and stimulus
of this memorable struggle; and Aphrodite and Thetis contrived to bring
about an interview between them.

At this period of the war the Grecian army was deprived of Palamedes,
one of its ablest chiefs. Odysseus had not forgiven the artifice by
which Palamedes 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, Palamedes was
drowned while fishing by the hands of Odysseus and Diomedes. Neither in
the _Iliad_ nor the _Odyssey_ does the name of Palamedes occur; the
lofty position which Odysseus occupies in both those poems--noticed with
some degree of displeasure even by Pindar, who described Palamedes as
the wiser man of the two--is sufficient to explain the omission. 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 Palamedes, combined
with his unhappy fate, rendered him one of the most interesting
personages in the Trojan legend. AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides 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
Agamemnon and the Grecian chiefs that Palamedes had received it from the
Trojans. He thus forfeited his life, a victim to the calumny of Odysseus
and to the delusion of the leading Greeks. The philosopher Socrates, in
the last speech made to his Athenian judges, alludes with solemnity and
fellow-feeli