One of our sources about GreekMyth!Palamedes is Defense of Palamedes, by Gorgias. (Gorgias was a Sophist, and Plato hated his guts so much he wrote a dialogue about it.)
Most of the text is Palamedes defending his innocence after Odysseus framed him for treason. And an argument he makes repeatedly is that you can't know things from being told them. You can only know things you've perceived yourself with your own senses. This is partly because direct experience doesn't lie and people do.
I read that and then laughed when I remembered how Muir introduces us to LockedTomb!Palamedes: he's prodding directly at the physical world, then worrying aloud that he's being "systematically lied to on a molecular level."
And an argument he makes repeatedly is that you can't know things from being told them. You can only know things you've perceived yourself with your own senses. This is partly because direct experience doesn't lie and people do.
I love this so much, and also it lends new, insane dimensions to The Unwanted Guest. "You can only know things you've perceived yourself with your own senses" is basically Ianthe's rebuttal when Pal first tries to debate her about the permeability of the soul. While Pal's point is that perception isn't serving Ianthe in this case as it might elsewhere because the timescale of the change in question is too crazy-big to comprehend in the time she's had so far:
And then, of course, his later point that her perception of what change might be happening is also skewed because the soul absorption process is messing with her ability to be objective:
I am not a Classics person but this is all making me want to try, dammit. And now the way I interpret Pal's character is shifting again...
