There is another remembered story of Odysseus, not in Homer, but recorded from Sophocles in some rough Latin notes of plays and myths which have otherwise disappeared. Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, is one month old when Palamēdēs, a messenger arrives from Agamemnon, instructing Odysseus to come to the war against Troy. Odysseus reacts as Achilles might, skeptically, reluctantly, and to escape the summons pretends to be mad. He takes a donkey and an ox, yokes them together on the same plow, as no man ever has or would, and when he has cut the first furrow he sows it not with seeds but with salt.
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