Everything about The Catalogue Of Women totally explained
The
Catalogue of Women (Greek: γυναικών κατάλογος,
gynaikōn katalogos) is an
Ancient Greek poem. Ancient writers sometimes attributed it to
Hesiod, although the poem contains a few references to events and things after Hesiod's time that could suggest that they were later added or that the epic is of a completely different author. Since Hesiod is known to us only as the author of the
Works and Days and the
Theogony, which may not have the same date or author, the distinction here's unclear. Since the dating of the poem is one of the most problematic issues surrounding it, the poem's author remains anonymous.
Title
In antiquity the poem was also known as the
Eoiai (; Latin
Eoeae,
Ehoeae,
Eoiae, etc.), from the formula Η' οιή (
ē' hoiē), "Or such a woman as ...", which introduces new sections within the poem; it's also possible that these are two poems in the same style - we know both only from quotations. The poem was also referred to in the plural as
Catalogues of Women, but the singular is much more common.
Date
Janko's monumental survey of epic language suggests that the
Catalogue is very early, perhaps contemporary with Hesiod's
Theogony, for example about 700 BCE. Other dates have been proposed:
Schwartz thought that the poem reached its final form between
506 BCE and
476 BCE, and
West, for more literary reasons, dates it to between
580 BCE and
520 BCE. The most important point pushing the date forwards is a reference to the city of
Cyrene (frr. 215 and 216 M-W), which was founded in
631 BCE. On the other hand, West himself assigns dates as early as
776 BCE to parts of the poem's content.
As always with texts deriving from
oral traditional sources (like the
Homeric epics), it's difficult to distinguish the periods at which part of the material within the poem was composed, and to determine the date at which the written text as we've it was finalised. Moreover, a poem whose main stage of composition was completed by 700 BCE, but was only transcribed in 550 BCE, is likely to have evolved considerably in some ways (adding references to Cyrene, modernising the formulaic style, etc.) while remaining the same in others (preserving some elements of an older poetic style).
Fragmentary epic
The poem is fragmentary, meaning that it survives in quotations, scraps of ancient
papyrus, and second-hand references in other authors. It is much better-attested than most "lost" works, though, and surviving portions of the original text are well over 1000 lines of verse, longer than either of the other "Hesiodic" poems, the
Works and Days and
Theogony.
References to the poem are normally in the form of a fragment number in a specified edition, with line numbers: for example "fr. 23(a).15 M-W" means fragment 23(a) in the edition by M(erkelbach) and W(est), line 15. All editions have their own numeration, so it's important to specify the edition. In one edition (Merkelbach and West 1967, 1990) nearly 250 fragments survive; in the most recent edition (Hirschberger 2004), the number is reduced, for various reasons, to 142. More fragments don't equate to a better edition; conversely, a more recent edition isn't necessarily the best. Therefore multiple editions will always exist side-by-side.
Content
The complete poem contained five books of verse in
dactylic hexameter. Each book may have been up to 1000 lines long. This is the same metre as
Homer, and the work resembles the
Catalogue of Ships in the
Iliad in being a list of disjoint items, briefly described. The Catalogue is a list of famous women in
Greek mythology, and their descendants by both men and gods. The poem opens,
Sing now of the tribe of women, sweet-voiced Olympian Muses,
daughters of aigis-bearing Zeus: those women who were the noblest,
and had sex with gods.
This invocation of the
Muses is standard
epic style.
The epic was broadly divided into a number of key genealogies, though the divisions between these, and how they were arranged through the epic's first four books, is debated. Important genealogies included are those of two of the children of
Deukalion and
Pyrrha:
Hellen and
Pandora who with respective partners
Orseis and
Zeus they give birth to the progenitors of the
Greek/
Hellenic nation:
Graecus,
Makedon,
Magnetas,
Dorieus,
Aeolos and
Xuthus (with his two sons,
Achaeus and
Ionas). Other significant genealogies include those of Aiolids, Inachids, Pelasgids, and Atlantids (descendants, respectively, of
Aeolus,
Inachus,
Pelasgus, and
Atlas). The style of the genealogies is similar to genealogical passages in the
Homeric epics, such as the genealogy of
Glaucus in
Iliad book 6, that of
Aeneias in
Iliad 21, or that of
Theoclymenus in
Odyssey 15. Brief descriptions are given of some figures in the genealogies, while others are elaborated and have substantial storylines attached to them. As a result the poem is a mine of information about
Greek mythology. There are also strong resemblances to the catalogue of heroines that
Odysseus sees in the underworld in
Odyssey 11.
Book 5 was different, and may originally have been a separate poem: it consisted a nearly 200-line catalogue of the
suitors of
Helen, similar in style to the
catalogue of ships in
Iliad book 2, and probably led into an account of the beginning of the
Trojan War (perhaps even leading directly into the
Cypria).
Reception and influence
As noted above, the poem has similarities to many passages in
Homer. This implies that they share a common
genre in some respects: the
Catalogue didn't exist in isolation, but belonged to a clear tradition of genealogical poetry.
The
Catalogue was extremely influential in the Hellenistic period. The Bibliotheca or Library of Greek mythology (attributed, wrongly, to Apollodorus) appears to have been largely modelled on the Catalogue, giving valuable evidence on the Catalogue's structure. The work was widely read: in
Egypt,
archaeologists have found
papyrus fragments of at least 52 separate copies of the
Catalogue, more than for almost any other single work other than the
Homeric epics, implying that the poem was one of the most popular of all literary works there.
It isn't known when the poem ceased to be read. No copies of the poem were preserved intact through the
Middle Ages, so there's no direct link between the
Catalogue and mediaeval catalogues of women such as
Boccaccio's 1361
De mulieribus claris or
Christine de Pizan's 1405
Cité des dames. The reconstruction of the work, based on citations in other classical authors, began with 19th-century
classical scholarship, and the first edition appeared in 1823, edited by
Gaisford as part of his collection
Poetae minores Graeci; two years later
Dindorf's
Hesiod appeared. The most important editions now are those of
Rzach (1913),
Merkelbach and
West (1967, 1990), and
Hirschberger (2004).
Bibliography
Editions
- Online editions, in Greek
- No online editions of the original text exist
- Online editions, in English translation:
- Print editions, in Greek
- Print editions, in English translation
- Evelyn-White, H.G. 1914, revised 1936, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN 0-674-99063-3 Loeb with Greek text.
- None of the modern collections of fragments includes a translation. Papyrus fragments are often incoherent.
Further Information
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