Trojan Battle Order

Structurally the Trojan Battle Order is evidently inserted to balance the preceding Catalogue of Ships.

Noting that the Greek catalogue occupies 265 lines but the Trojan catalogue only 61, Page wonders why the Ionian authors know so little about their native land and concludes they are not describing it but are reforming poetry inherited in oral form from Mycenaean times (Page 1963, pp. 137–139).

The allied contingents are said to have spoken multiple languages, requiring orders to be translated by their individual commanders.

[4] The classical Greek historian Demetrius of Scepsis, native of Scepsis in the hills above Troy, wrote a vast study of the "Trojan Battle Order" under that title (Greek Trōikos diakosmos).

The work is lost; brief extracts from it are quoted by Athenaeus and Pausanias, while Strabo cites it frequently in his own discussion of the geography of northwestern Anatolia.