When truth dies first

 Palamedes, wisest of the Greeks, came to a bad end. He was executed for treason during the Trojan War. He’s famous for mourning truth, which he said died before he did.

During the first nine years of the Trojan War, the Greeks raided Troy’s allies, hoping to cut off supplies. Achilles and Ajax came back to camp with loot and captives. Odysseus returned from Thrace empty handed. Palamedes, suspecting a lack of initiative and possibly a lack of courage, let Odysseus hear about it.

Odysseus, at least in the early legends, was the kind of man who always got even.

Odysseus convinced Agamemnon, the supreme commander, that the gods had warned that the Greeks must move their camp for just one night. The army moved out, and that night Odysseus buried some gold at Palamedes’s campsite. Odysseus forced a Phrygian prisoner to forge a letter, allegedly from King Priam of Troy, saying that the money was the agreed price for betraying the Greeks. When the prisoner finished the letter, Odysseus killed him on the spot.

The next day, the army moved back to its original campsite. Somebody found the body and then found the letter.

When Palamedes protested his innocence, Odysseus helpfully suggested that the Greeks search his campsite.

The ancient Greeks constantly worked on their legends and myths. This one was older than Homer, who saw Odysseus in better light.

One of the traditional readings of the tale is that wise people don’t last long in places where truth isn’t valued. It’s a lesson Socrates might have appreciated.

But I like the aftermath, which suggests a problem with abandoning truth.

Palamedes’s father, Nauplius, heard of his son’s murder and sailed to Troy to demand justice. He appealed to Agamemnon, the army commander, who turned the old man away.

Nauplius could do nothing against the powerful block that had gained control of Greece. But on the way back home, he stopped at the palaces of almost all the murderers. He told the wife of each murderer that her husband was bringing a captured princess home as his new queen.

Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, was one of several women who took the story badly.

• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 299-300.

Norman Maclean's stories

 The New York Times tells us that A River Runs Through It is 50 years old. The Times points out that the percentage of American males that read fiction is declining. Norman Maclean’s novella was barely published 50 years ago. Could it be published today?

The book, as opposed to the novella, is A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. One of those stories, “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim,’” is about a lumberjack that the narrator hated. The narrator sounds like Maclean.

Jim was the best sawyer in the crew. The narrator worked as his partner, needing the money for graduate school. Jim was bigger and stronger. Manning a crosscut saw with him was an ordeal.

The story includes long passages on the importance of good boots and on the psychological games men play when they have to work with someone they hate. It also includes this:

 

It was getting hot and I was half-sick when I came back to camp at the end of the day. I would dig into my duffel back and get clean underwear and clean white socks and a bar of soap and go to the creek. Afterwards, I would sit on the bank until I was dry. Then I would feel better. It was a rule I had learned my first year working in the Forest Service — when exhausted and feeling sorry for yourself, at least change socks.

 

I’m one of those American males who read fewer works of fiction than I used to. The newer books that I tried and gave up on had conflicts that didn’t hold my attention.

I read Maclean’s story with wonder. If he were alive and writing today, I’d read more fiction.

• Sources: Monte Burke, “Could ‘A River Runs Through It’ Have Been a Hit Today?” The New York Times, April 20, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/books/could-a-river-runs-through-it-have-been-a-hit-today.html?unlocked_article_code=1.d1A.KnEH.XeCTgpqEXfHV&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories; New York: Pocket Books, 1992, p. 122.

The list of freedoms

 The most startling passage in Stefan Zweig’s book on Montaigne is a list of freedoms.

Montaigne was a seeker, and he sought to understand the things that stood in his way, slowed him down, kept him from being the person he wanted to be. “One might be tempted to draw up a list,” Zweig says, and he does. The list is in the form of “freedom from” or “to be free of.” It reads like a UN document.

I was not surprised to see freedom from pride at the top of the list, and freedom from presumption, ambition and greed nearby.

But I began to wonder when I got to freedom from fear and hope, belief and superstition. I can see what Zweig is saying: Montaigne doubted everything. But he also was a believer.

I was surprised when I got to freedom from family and familial surroundings. Montaigne liked his privacy and spent time alone in his tower. But he strikes me as a person who was part of a place. His homestead — and the many people in it — were part of him.

The most interesting item is freedom from custom. Custom — the countless small agreements we make when we live in a community — holds societies together. Montaigne was, in a way, a traditionalist. But Zweig is right. Montaigne was brutally frank about the costs. Here’s the opening of his essay “On the custom of wearing clothing”:

 

Whichever way I want to go I find myself obliged to break through some barrier of custom, so thoroughly has she blocked all our approaches.”

 

He argued that we must find the difference between natural laws and rules we contrive. He picks up the same in “On ancient customs”: 

 

I am prepared to forgive our own people for having no other model or rule of perfection but their own manners and behavior, for it is a common failing not only of the mob but of virtually all men to set their sights within the limitations of the customs into which we were born.

 

• Sources: Stefan Zweig, Montaigne, translated by Will Stone; London: Pushkin Press, 2015. The list of freedoms is on pp. 112-13.

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. The quotations are on pp. 253 and 331.

What April is like

 In the garden, the tender plants came up.

Then came an explosion of insects — all kinds, but I noticed the caterpillars, which were dining on the plants.

Then came a hatch of paper wasps, reddish brown with gold trim, and the air was full of dive bombers, killing caterpillars and other bugs.

Finally, the flycatchers lined the fence rail, waiting for any wasp that dared to fly across the garden.

All these sights can be seen by an idler who leans on his shovel, goofing off when he should be digging.

Wars and stories of war

 Herodotus told the story of many men who fought at Platea. I’ve been thinking of three.

Aristodamus of Sparta somehow survived Thermopylae and was so shamed that he tried to make up for it with insane bravery at Platea. He was awarded no honors. His comrades knew he wanted to die.

Sophanes of Athens was an eccentric who, in one telling, carried an anchor around the battlefield. He dropped it whenever the enemy charged. It’s one way to eliminate even the thought of running away.

Herodotus also tells of a nameless Persian who shared a couch with Thersander of Orchomenus at a Theban-Persian banquet before the battle. The Persian drank too much because grief had brought him to tears. He could see, clearly, the folly of a stupid war instigated by an arrogant tyrant. He could see the folly but could do nothing about it.

I find myself thinking about the drunk Persian these days.

• Source: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 570 (Aristodamas), p. 571 (Sophanes), and pp. 546-7 (the unnamed Persian).

Politics and academic politics

 A little more on names in ancient Greece: By making changes to names, some people in higher education tried rebrand their rivals. Someone called the philosopher Democritus Lerocritus, meaning nonsense dealer. Antidorus, another philosopher, became Sannidorus, meaning gift-bearing sycophant.

People played with names and with descriptions. Imagine that you are trying to decide on a school for your kid. You hear that one school is run by wastrel who, after squandering his inheritance, took up soldiering and drug sales.

Are you thinking of Aristotle?

The civilization from which our civilization allegedly emerged was not all that civilized. 

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, p. 536. Diogenes says that all these ugly sayings were attributed — falsely — to Epicurus.

A character who's missing something

 I’m partial to Robert Graves’s handling of the Greek myths. I was warned many years ago that his work was imaginative, rather than scholarly. But I continue to read him. He often finds what to my mind is the shortest, simplest explanation to a puzzle.

If you search for clues to the meaning of Achilles’s name, you’ll find all kinds of heroic possibilities. Graves points out that the -chilles part of the name is literally lips. The Greeks used the prefix a- to mean without or lacking. So lipless.

The world is full of false etymologies, and I’m not enough of a scholar to make any claim. I’d just say that the name fits. Homer depicts Achilles as a great man — but also a humorless one.

I think American literature is richer for having characters like Shoeless Joe Jackson around. I like characters who are lacking something. I’d read a story about a character named Lipless Joe, wouldn’t you?

• Source and note: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 288. The word for lip is χειλον. If I were a scholar, I’d put a circumflex over the iota.