The Cleverest of the Greeks

      If you hear the question ‘Who was the cleverest of the Greeks?’ and immediately answer ‘Odysseus, of course!’ then you clearly need to be reminded of the story of the man who outsmarted Odysseus, the cleverer-than-clever Palamedes.

      Odysseus was certainly clever enough. He was the one who arranged the extraordinary and massive pan-Hellenic army to go besiege Troy and plunder it for all its assets, although that wasn’t the way he planned it at the time. It all goes back to Helen’s adolescence (and Helen was a ravishing little girl even then). Her father realized that she would soon be married, and that the lucky man she’d married would be far outnumbered by the unlucky men she hadn’t married, and that for the sake of his daughter’s safety he would have to devise some sort of safety mechanism for the marriage. Naturally he enlisted the help of the cleverest of the Greeks--call Odysseus! Odysseus told Helen’s father to invite all comers to court Helen, but he set down two extraordinary stipulations. First, Helen would be allowed to choose her own husband from the available suitors (A young girl choosing her own husband? Inconceivable!). That way the blame for a bad choice of husband (any man who was not chosen was likely to regard hers as a bad choice) would rest on none other than the woman in question. Second, all the suitors were required to take an oath that, whoever Helen chose to marry, they would support her choice as an ad hoc militia and defend her marriage against any interlopers. According to Odysseus’ plan, even if one of the suitors--or anyone else--interfered with Helen’s marriage, he who interfered would face not only the social consequences of breaking an oath made in public, but also the wrath of all the other suitors who had kept their word (and would feel indignant that someone else had not). So Helen made her choice in favor of Menelaus. Later, when Helen went off to Troy with Paris (whether willingly or unwillingly), the suitors’ oath was activated, and all the suitors were obligated to trudge off to Troy and re-capture Helen to return to her husband--their opportunity to ransack Troy and take all the gold was just a convenient bonus.

      (It is interesting that, if you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, Helen has a strong and clearly developed personality. She is unimpressed by Paris’ weakness in battle, she displays complete sang-froid when visited by Aphrodite herself, and she feeds a happiness drug to Menelaus and Telemachus when she gets fed up with listening to them bewail the tragedies of the past. She is very sophisticated and collected; she states her own opinions and doesn’t let anyone change her mind. The Homeric epics don’t reveal a similar level of information about Menelaus’ personality (in the Odyssey he performs standard hospitality practices with Telemachus, but it’s all ritual and there’s not much room for his individuality to shine through), which is too bad, because it would be interesting to see why Helen chose to marry him. Was he just someone weak whom she thought she could manipulate, or was there a more significant connection between them?)

      When the oath is activated, this is when Odysseus’ plan comes around to bite him, because he too took that oath that he would defend Helen’s marriage, and he doesn’t want to go to war. So he feigns insanity: when Menelaus and company show up to conscript Odysseus, Odysseus is out in his fields, plowing for the spring planting and sowing his fields with salt instead of seed. Salt, as we all know from hearing erroneous rumors about Carthage, prevents plants from growing and is more or less impossible to remove from soil; if you spill a bunch of salt in an agricultural field, you’ll be living with the consequences for years. Why, you’d have to be crazy to do it! Menelaus sees Odysseus salting his field, but he knows Odysseus’ reputation as a clever manipulator and decides that he needs to run a test to see whether Odysseus’ mental illness is genuine. Menelaus enlists the only person clever enough to outsmart Odysseus, i.e. Palamedes, who grabs Odysseus’ infant son and places him in the path of the plow. Odysseus diverts the plow from harming his son, thereby proving not only that Odysseus is only feigning insanity and can be duly conscripted, but also that Palamedes is capable of outwitting Odysseus. Odysseus does not like this one bit.

      Odysseus faithfully comes to Troy in fulfillment of the vow, but he does so unwillingly and never forgets his animosity for Palamedes. In the end, he quite cold-bloodedly decides to kill Palamedes in revenge for his cleverness. There is a version in which Odysseus sets up an incredibly convoluted scheme to convict Palamedes of treason and thereby have him executed (it involves a fake oracle, a murdered messenger, a forged letter, and the injunction to uproot the ENTIRE Greek camp and re-establish it in a different location), but the simpler version of the story is that Odysseus lures Palamedes out onto a boat and drowns him, apparently hoping that no one will connect Palamedes’ sudden disappearance with Odysseus’ longstanding, implacable grudge against him. I’m partial to the latter version because it’s so unaccountably direct for an Odyssean scheme; usually when that proverbially clever Odysseus wants to accomplish something, his method involves persuading five different people to do contradictory things. But in this case, what should be his masterpiece of deception--deceiving the only person who was ever able to deceive him!--is rendered utterly flat as Odysseus fails to devise a better murder than Nero plotted for his mother. He does kill Palamedes successfully, possibly because no one can imagine Odysseus committing such a mundane murder.

      In the end, one way or another, Odysseus engineers Palamedes’ death and gets away with it. Odysseus, as we all know, survives the war and eventually returns home after having lost everything, after which he resumes the kingship of Ithaca and kills all his rivals. He himself will eventually be murdered by the son he had with Circe (stabbed with a stingray barb, after they argued over some cattle without knowing each other’s identities). Ultimately Odysseus retains the honor of being cleverest of the Greeks, if only by killing his rival. Even then, his cleverness wasn’t enough to win him a natural death at ripe old age. It goes to show that, even though Odysseus might have been good at manipulating people by lying to them, his demand for respect prevailed over all. He used it to kill Palamedes, but it came to kill him in the end.