Palamedes, not unknown to fame,
Who suffered from the malice of the times,
Accused and sentenced for pretended crimes.

VERGIL.

It is said that Palamedes was the inventor of weights and measures, and
of the games of chess and backgammon, and that it was he who first
placed sentinels round a camp and gave them a watchword.

There was another of the Greek princes whose help in the Trojan War was
obtained only by an ingenious trick. This was the famous A-chilʹles. He
was the son of Peleus and Thetis, at whose marriage feast Eris threw the
apple of discord on the table. The prophecy that Thetis would have a son
greater than his father was fulfilled in Achilles, the bravest of the
Greeks at the Trojan War, and the principal hero of Homer's Iliad.

Thetis educated her son with great care. She had him instructed in all
the accomplishments fitting for princes of those times. When he was an
infant she dipped him in the river Styx, which, it was believed, made it
impossible for any weapon wielded by mortal hands to wound him. But the
water did not touch the child's heel by which his mother held him when
she plunged him in the river, and it was in this part that he received
the wound of which he died.

Notwithstanding his being dipped in the Styx, Thetis was afraid to let
Achilles go to the Trojan War, for Jupiter had told her that he would be
killed if he took part in it. For this reason, as soon as she heard that
the Grecian princes were gathering their forces, she secretly sent the