The Poetics of the Catalogue in the Hesiodic Theogony

Abstract

Some Hesiodic catalogues praise the individual named last as superlative and worthy of greater description or narrative. This traditional feature reveals different levels of composition. The catalogues of the Muses or the Titans, for example, reveal two versions, one claiming that groups operate collectively and another stressing the individual agency of the last-named sibling (Calliope or Cronus). In other cases the original framework of the catalogue seems to have been extended by additional names that aim at a different compositional scheme. Plato’s myth of the locusts in the Phaedrus (259c–d) and the closing verses of the famous Catalogue of Ships in Iliad 2 may reflect the same phenomenon.