In Greek mythology, Palamedes (Ancient Greek: Παλαμήδης) was the son of Nauplius and either Clymene or Philyra or Hesione.
He is said to have invented counting, currency, weights and measures, jokes, dice and pessoi, as well as military ranks. Sometimes he is credited with discoveries in the field of wine making and the supplementary letters of the Greek alphabet.
Agamemnon sent Palamedes to Ithaca to retrieve Odysseus, who had promised to defend the marriage of Helen and Menelaus. Paris had kidnapped Helen, but Odysseus did not want to honor his oath. He pretended to be insane and plowed his fields with salt. Palamedes guessed what was happening and put Odysseus' son, Telemachus, in front of the plow. Odysseus stopped working and revealed his sanity.
Odysseus never forgave Palamedes for sending him to the Trojan War. When Palamedes advised the Greeks to return home, Odysseus hid gold in his tent and wrote a fake letter purportedly from Priam. The letter was found and the Greeks accused him of being a traitor. Palamedes was stoned to death by Odysseus and Diomedes. According to other accounts the two warriors drowned him. Still another version relates that he was lured into a well in search of treasure, and then was crushed by stones. Although he was a major character in the Trojan War as the prince of Nauplia leading the Nauplians, Palamedes is not mentioned in Homer's Iliad.
Ovid discusses Palamedes' role in the Trojan War in the Metamorphoses. Palamedes' fate is described in Virgil's Aeneid. Plato describes Socrates as looking forward to speaking with Palamedes after death. Euripides and many other dramatists have written dramas about his fate.
Hyginus revives an old account that Palamedes created eleven letters of the Greek alphabet:
The three Fates created the first five vowels of the alphabet and the letters B and T. It is said that Palamedes, son of Nauplius invented the remaining eleven consonants. Then Hermes reduced these sounds to characters, showing wedge shapes because cranes fly in wedge formation and then carried the system from Greece to Egypt*. This was the Pelasgian alphabet, which Cadmus had later brought to Boeotia, then Evander of Arcadia, a Pelasgian, introduced into Italy, where his mother, Carmenta, formed the familiar fifteen characters of the Latin alphabet. Other consonants have since been added to the Greek alphabet. Alpha was the first of eighteen letters, because alphe means honor, and alphainein is to invent.