Palamedes (Ancient Greek: Παλαμήδης, "the handy" or "contriving one") was a Euboean prince, son of King Nauplius, who joined the Greek expedition against Troy. Famous for exposing Odysseus's feigned madness at the muster, he is absent from Homer's Iliad but central to cyclic and tragic tradition as inventor of letters, numbers, and dice — and as the victim of Odysseus's forged charge of treason.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Palamedes (mythology)" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Family and the muster
His mother is Clymene daughter of Catreus, or Hesione, or Philyra; his brothers include Oeax and Nausimedon. When Agamemnon summons the oath-bound kings for Helen, Odysseus feigns madness — yoking mismatched beasts so the plow runs wild. Palamedes places infant Telemachus in the furrow; Odysseus swerves aside and is exposed. The episode fixes Palamedes as Odysseus's intellectual rival and the object of a lasting grudge.
II.Death at Troy
Sources disagree on the murder. Hyginus: Odysseus hides gold in Palamedes' tent and plants a forged letter from Priam; the Greeks stone him for treason. Pausanias (citing the Cypria): Odysseus and Diomedes drown him on a fishing trip. Dictys: he is lured into a well after treasure and crushed with stones. A wildly different Dares Phrygius tradition makes him elected leader over Agamemnon, briefly successful in battle, then shot by Paris — a version popular in medieval Troy romances.
Nauplius avenges his son by lighting false beacons that wreck the returning Greek fleets. Plato's Socrates looks forward to conversing with Palamedes among the dead; Gorgias wrote a Defense of Palamedes; Euripides and others dramatised his fate.
III.Inventions
Greek tradition credits Palamedes with aspects of counting and writing. Plato's Republic has him claim the invention of numbers; Pausanias records dice he dedicated at Argos's Temple of Fortune; Hyginus says he invented eleven letters of the Greek alphabet. Dares describes him as tall, slender, wise, magnanimous, and charming.