| Catalogue Of Ships |
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| trojan war | |
| iliad | |
| SHOPPER'S DELIGHT | |
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The famous Catalogue of Ships (νεων κατολογος ''neon katalogos'') is recorded as a part of Book II (verses 494–760) of Homer 's '' Iliad ''. It lists the names of all the allies who came with the Achaeans to lay siege to Troy along with the names of their leaders and the number of ships they brought with them. It is followed by a similar, though shorter, list of the Trojan s' allies. In the debate since Antiquity over the Catalogue of Ships the core question has concerned the extent of historical credibility of the account, whether it was written by Homer himself, whether it reflects a pre-Homeric document or memorized tradition, surviving perhaps from Mycenaean times, or whether it is a result of post-Homeric developmentIn which case it would have been subject to flattering interpolations of the mythic forbears of the patrons of the epic's singers.. If it were perfectly trustworthy, the Catalogue would provide a rare summary of the geopolitical situation in the region, either of the Bronze Age or of the eighth century BCE. Following Milman Parry 's concept of Homeric Oral Poetry , some readers argue that it represents pre-Homeric formulae that were imbedded in the epic by Homer. Few argue that it dates as early as the time of the Trojan War in the mid 13th Century BC , however. Others contend that it dates from the time of Homer himself in the 8th Century BC and is an attempt to transfer contemporary information back five centuries. An intermediate theory is that the catalogue developed through a process of accretion during the poem's Oral Transmission and reflects gradual inclusion of the homelands of local sponsors by individual singers. In the most recent extended study of the Catalogue, Edzard Visser of the University of Basel, concludes that the catalogue is compatible with the rest of the ''Iliad'' in techniques of verse improvisation, that the order of the names is meaningful and that the geographical epithets evince concrete geographical knowledge, transmitted, Visser maintains, by heroic myth, which introduces each geographical section. THE CATALOGUE The Catalogue lists twenty-eight contingents accounting for a total of 1186 ships, corresponding to a force of some 100.000 to 140.000 men. It contains 50 toponyms and 150 ethnonyms.
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