Catalogue of Women

In contrast with the focus upon narrative in the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, the Catalogue was structured around a vast system of genealogies stemming from these unions and, in M. L. West's appraisal, covered "the whole of the heroic age.

Greek aristocratic communities, the ruling elite, traced their lineages back to the heroes of epic poetry; thus the Catalogue, a veritable "map of the Hellenic world in genealogical terms," preserves much information about a complex system of kinship associations and hierarchies that continued to have political importance long after the Archaic period.

[2] Many of the myths in the Catalogue are otherwise unattested, either entirely so or in the form narrated therein, and held a special fascination for poets and scholars from the late Archaic period through the Hellenistic and Roman eras.

Despite its popularity among the Hellenistic literati and reading public of Roman Egypt, the poem went out of circulation before it could pass into a medieval manuscript tradition and is preserved today by papyrus fragments and quotations in ancient authors.

It may have belonged originally to a genre of poetry that simply listed notable heroines,[8] but in the Catalogue the formula is used as a structuring tool that allows the poet to resume a broken branch of a family tree, or to jump horizontally across genealogies to a new figure and line of descent.

[13] It is believed that a rough guide to this structure can be found in the Bibliotheca, a Roman-era mythological handbook transmitted under the name of Apollodorus of Athens which used the Catalogue as a primary source for many genealogical details and appears to have followed the poem's overall arrangement.

[16] Toward the end of the Theogony as transmitted by the manuscript tradition, following Zeus's final ordering of Olympus and his siring several key deities, the poet invokes the Muses to sing of the "tribe of goddesses … immortals who slept with mortal men, bearing children like gods.

[19] The differing fates of the heroes are then described: some appear to have lived a long life characterized by perpetual youth, while others were apparently condemned to an early death by the gods.

[22] There is some debate about whether the Catalogue included an account of the Flood myth,[23] but the creation of a race of humans born from stones cast by Deucalion and Pyrrha does appear to have figured in the poem.

Aeolus' extended family, via both sons and daughters, is notable for a concentration of fantastical narratives and folk elements of a sort largely absent from the Homeric poems, beginning with the doomed, hubristic love of Ceyx and Alcyone, who called one another "Zeus" and "Hera" and were turned into the kingfisher and halcyon as punishment (frr.

[48] As king of Elis, Salmoneus forced his subjects to worship him as Zeus and simulated the god's thunder and lightning by dragging bronze cauldrons from his chariot and throwing torches through the air.

[74] She had the ability to change her shape at will, a skill which her father Erysichthon exploited in service of a ravening hunger with which he had been cursed and for which reason the people had nicknamed him Aethon (Αἴθων, Aithon, "Blazing").

[98] The daughters of Proetus offended Hera or Dionysus or both in some way, and were cursed with leprosy or madness which could only be cured by Melampous, a service which Abas rewarded by granting the seer and his brother Bias shares of Argos to rule.

[109] The toss of the third apple finally accomplished its aim, but the couple did not live happily after: through the will of Zeus Atalanta was transformed into lion because she had seen "what it is not lawful to see," which presumably means that she had unlawfully entered a holy precinct.

[127] Ephorus called the episode the Gês Períodos (Γῆς Περίοδος, "Journey Around the World"), and it was once thought that this title referred to an independent work, one erroneously attributed to Hesiod.

"[136] In the Bibliotheca, the Arcadian genealogies are immediately followed by the Atlantids, and this progression is known to mirror the structure of the Catalogue because other fragments of the papyrus roll that transmits the Telephus myth cover families of Atlas' daughters: Taygete, Electra, Alcyone, Sterope, Celaeno, Maia and Merope.

[170] The marriage of Helen and Menelaus precipitates the Trojan War, the event that ultimately brings the heroic age to an end, but the circumstances surrounding this transition in the Catalogue are unclear.

A great storm arises which dwindles the strength of mankind:[174] These lines, described by West as "the finest passage of poetry yet known from the Catalogue",[175] might parallel Calchas' prophecy in Iliad 2, which presages the first nine fruitless years of the Trojan War via the image of a snake devouring nine sparrows.

A scholium on the ode states that "Pindar took the story from an Ehoie of Hesiod's" (ἀπὸ δὲ Ἠοίας Ἡσιόδου τὴν ἱστορίαν ἔλαβεν ὁ Πίνδαρος) and relates the opening lines of the section (Cat.

215): Richard Janko, who believes that the Catalogue was composed c. 690, argues that the extent to which Pindar relied upon the Hesiodic text is unknown and that, even if Apollo did carry Cyrene to Libya, this does not presuppose an aetiology of the city.

[181] The complete removal of Cyrene would not, however, be easily accommodated by related evidence—it would presumably also involve transferring two fragments concerning Aristaeus which have traditionally been attributed to the Catalogue, and his son Actaeon certainly appeared in the poem.

[183] According to the dictionary, the Catalogue included a variant of the myth in which Actaeon was changed into a stag by Artemis and then killed by his own hounds because he attempted to take Semele as his wife, thus angering Zeus, who had designs upon the woman.

[197] Such a scenario could account for perceived anachronisms in the mythological content and in the linguistic character of the poem,[198] but would sidestep the issue of the relation between the Catalogue as it has been transmitted and the broader corpus of early Greek epic.

[207] The Catalogue's greatest influence was felt during the Hellenistic period, when the poem was used as an extra-Homeric touchstone for the poets of the era who favored recondite and antiquarian references over direct engagement with the more prominent members of the canon.

[210] Phanocles, a near contemporary of Hermesianax, composed an elegiac catalogue of mythological pederastic relationships entitled the Loves or Beautiful Boys in which each story was introduced by the formula ē' hōs (ἠ' ὡς), "or like".

[214] In his epyllion on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, Catullus alludes to the theoxeny that the proem to the Catalogue presented as a defining characteristic of the heroic age and to the epithalamium of the couple that was sung in a later book.

[215] In the Aeneid Vergil closes his catalogue of combatants with the swift female warrior Camilla, alluding to the Hesiodic account of Iphiclus' speed in "a remarkably subtle nod to tradition in the best Alexandrian style.

Other vestiges of the poem's influence are less clear: the Pseudo-Apollodoran Bibliotheca, an early Roman-era handbook of Greek mythology, for example, is widely believed to have taken the Catalogue as its primary structural model, although this is not stated explicitly within that text.

[224] Bergk and his contemporaries still largely followed Marckscheffel's conclusion that the Catalogue and Ehoiai were semi-distinct texts, and it was not until 1894 that Friedrich Leo finally demonstrated that these were in fact alternate titles for a single poem.

[225] A few years before Leo's paper, the first small papyrus fragment was found, and the first half of the twentieth century would see the publication of several other pieces which added significantly to the modern text of the Catalogue.