Meanwhile, the Trojans had assembled a large body of allies from various parts of Asia Minor and Thrace:  Dardanians under AEneas, Lycians under Sarpedon, Mysians, Carians, Maeonians, Alizonians, Phrygians, Thracians, and Paeonians.  But vain was the attempt to oppose the landing of the Greeks:  the Trojans were routed, and even the invulnerable Cyncus, son of Poseidon, one of the great bulwarks of the defense, was slain by Achilles.  Having driven the 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-feeling to the unjust condemnation of Palamedes as analogous to that which he himself was about to suffer; and his companions seem to have dwelt with satisfaction on the comparison.  Palamedes passed for an instance of the slanderous enmity and misfortune which so often wait upon superior genius.