For a long time detailed consideration of the Homeric catalogues has been far more common among German scholars than it has been among the Anglophone community, and only recently have there been any moves to redress the balance. Now in this work S. sets out to examine the catalogues' function: how they were deployed by characters and to what rhetorical effect, and how the poet uses them to reflect upon his narrative and his poetry. S. adopts a narrow definition of ‘catalogue’ that excludes all catalogue-style passages that have a narrative element, such as the Teichoskopia in Iliad 3. A strictly limited number of passages are selected for treatment, and the Catalogue of Ships is discussed only halfway through the work.
The introduction defines, typifies and anatomises a ‘catalogue’ in the sense it will have for S.'s project. It also contains a brief outline of the ‘Homeric Question’, in particular as it pertains to catalogues. This proves to be a more than usually necessary exercise, for in his arguments S. posits a highly self-conscious author who uses catalogues variously to ironise or reflect upon his poetic endeavour and the proceedings of his characters.
The opening chapter, ‘Two Paradigmatic Catalogues’, focusses on Dione's catalogue of gods wounded by mortals in Iliad 5 and Calypso's catalogue of mortals loved by gods in Odyssey 5. S. argues that the differences between the rhetorical purpose of the passages as presented by the characters and the plot of the epic are intentional. The mismatch serves to call attention to the differences between the heroic world of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the more extreme and bizarre world of other poetic traditions (as later seen in the Epic Cycle). S. further suggests that the catalogue form creates a model of a repeated pattern which can come to suggest a narrative. The paradigms implied by the catalogues construct an epic world and history as a background to the events of the poem, but the differences between the worlds of catalogue and epic mean that the relationship is one of contrast.
Chapter 2, ‘Two Catalogues of Women’, continues and extends this argument. In his consideration of Zeus' catalogue of his affairs in Iliad 14, S. argues that the differences between the plot of the epic and how Zeus is characterised within it, and the structure of the catalogue and the picture of Zeus that it gives, call attention to the differences between the unity of the Iliad (as later praised by Aristotle) and the episodic nature of genealogical-style catalogue poetry (as criticised by Aristotle). The second part of the chapter deals with the nekyia in Odyssey 11. S. takes his argument in new directions, considering the limitations of the catalogue form and the ways it can merge with narrative. He also looks at the relationship between catalogue and kleos, something already adumbrated in his previous chapter.
Chapter 3 is entitled ‘Two Catalogues of Objects’, but it might have been more justly called ‘Three Catalogues of Gifts and One of Sons’. S. introduces the topic by a brief discussion of a catalogue of trees in Odyssey 24, gifts to Odysseus from Laertes. The main focus, however, is on the gifts assembled by Priam as a ransom for Hector's body and his rebuke to his sons in Iliad 24, and the gifts offered by Agamemnon to Achilles in Iliad 9. In both cases S. shows that the cataloguing of gifts carries with it, through the rhetoric of the gifts' associations, narratives of the past or of an imagined future that contrast with the characters' present situations.
Chapter 4 turns to the Catalogue of Ships. S. argues that its ‘temporal dislocation’ – the references to ships and lost leaders – is a deliberate ploy by the poet, a look back to the beginning of the war. As such it participates in the themes of Iliad 2, in which characters have looked back to events at Aulis. The mentions of ships are to create a dynamic, narrative effect; the many otherwise unknown leaders are to call into question the link between catalogue and kleos, and to suggest a problematic image of the heroic world; that the leaders praised in the catalogue are other than those praised in the narrative is part of an ‘extended meditation’ on the difference between the larger mythological world and the world of the poet's own epic. These elements of undercutting may, S. suggests, be an implicit criticism of the Epic Cycle.
The final chapter, ‘Three Catalogues of Suitors’, is little more than a (rather anticlimactic) coda; a consideration of the implications for the poetic perpetuation of kleos of a refusal to name figures in a catalogue.
The chief defect of this work is the amount of special pleading in S.'s argument, in particular where he asserts the poet's reflection on his own and other epics. When he points to inconsistencies as telling and ironising, at times S. has to argue for the very existence of those inconsistencies. At the same time, far larger inconsistencies associated with the Catalogue of Ships are brushed rather hastily away. Acceptance of the passage as the poet's own creation should not have entailed a denial that the text has undergone any form of change. For example, S. dismisses the notorious brevity of the Telamonian Ajax's Salamis entry as excused by the cataloguer's prerogative to present his material in a minimal form: a claim that must beg the questions – why exercise that prerogative, and why there?
None the less, this book makes many valuable points, in particular with regards to the construction of narrative through the catalogue form, the question of kleos, and the varying depictions of the mythological world. Analyses of individual passages, divorced from the more tendentious arguments, provide some noteworthy insights. S. makes a good case for the art, at least, of the Homeric Catalogues.
