The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women was, to all appearances, a hugely influential and popular poem in its day, but until recently it has been at best an esoteric subject in classical scholarship. Fortunately the past decade has witnessed a steady proliferation of studies, most addressing the poem's content and structure, as one would expect with a fragmentary text. O. now takes the discussion significantly further with a searching exploration of its literary, social and ideological outlook.

Chapter 1 lays out O.'s assumption about the origin and nature of the poem. He assigns it to the sixth century, and sees it as a product of oral tradition. It is ‘Hesiodic’ in character if not authorship, since it aims for an ‘ambitiously comprehensive mythological genealogy’ (p. 7) carried down to the end of the heroic age. The rest of the chapter lays the groundwork for a socio-political reading of the poem, drawing on Kurke and Morris's idea of tension between established aristocratic ideology and a new, polis-based ‘middling’ ideology. O. sees the Catalogue as a text with a strong and embattled aristocratic point of view – indeed, ‘a reactionary text of the volatile sixth century’ (p. 84). This ideology is expressed through depiction of heroic wooing and marriage, which come under closer scrutiny in Chapter 2: in vacillating between dowry and an older idea of bride-price or hedna, the Homeric poems reflect a blend of aristocratic and ‘middling’ practices. Consistent depiction of marriage through hedna in the Catalogue indicates an undiluted aristocratic perspective. Examples in the poem show that hedna are an instrument of elite competition for brides, analysable in terms of aristocratic gift-exchange.

Chapter 3 examines myths about shape-shifting women. Such myths reflect anxiety about the status of women before marriage; hence shape-shifting women lose their metamorphic powers once they are married. The prime example is Mestra; the Catalogue's version is unique in that it represents her as being repeatedly married rather than repeatedly sold by her father, a ruse that is foiled when Sisyphus goes to law on behalf of his jilted son. The story held interest in exploring the girl's divided loyalty to her father and her prospective husband, a tension that O. connects with the Solonian institution of the epiklêros.

Chapter 4 deals with the Atalanta myth. O. sees a version in which Atalanta does not merely race her suitor but chases him in a kind of hunt. He builds on this with an intertextual argument that the Catalogue alludes to the ‘race’ between Achilles and Hector in the Iliad; both are races in which the prize is a man's life, a parallel revealed in similarity of language between the two texts. Through this allusion the Catalogue emphasises Atalanta's role as pursuer, and also co-opts the surprising eroticism of the Iliadic passage. The story of the race shows ‘a ritual through which Atalanta's wild, unmarried, and deadly nature is tamed through acceptance of erotic gifts leading to marriage’ (p. 127).

Chapter 5 deals with the tale of Heracles’ conception and birth. Amphitryon's murder of Electryon suggests a buried narrative of quarrel between groom and father, with the bride showing greater loyalty to the former. Zeus's dalliance with Alcmene represents both the beginning and the demise of the heroic age – it is the example par excellence of divine/mortal procreation, but also draws Zeus into a process that will lead eventually to the separation of gods and men. Other details contribute to this effect: Amphitryon's expedition against the Teleboans looks forward to still greater conflicts around Thebes and Troy, and his return becomes a comic version of the return of Odysseus.

Chapter 6 deals with the wooing of Helen, which departs in a number of ways from the Catalogue's usual depiction of marriage, particularly through a series of variations on the institution of hedna and through an insistence on the kleos of Helen rather than that of her suitors. Emphasis on the heroes’ desire for Helen implies a ‘dangerous inversion of power’ (p. 195). In O.'s reading the whole episode is rife with pessimism: the wooing of Helen is determined by wealth rather than virtue, implying an end to an aristocratic ideal; numerous allusions to the Trojan War point to the end of the heroic age; and the ‘unhoped-for’ birth of Hermione alludes to the myth of Pandora, connecting the whole episode with the end of the Golden Age.

The book concludes with an epilogue consisting of three independent discussions (of Semonides 7, the caryatids on the Siphnian treasury at Delphi and Herodotus’ tale of the marriage of Agariste). The lack of a formal conclusion is unfortunate, since the chapters explore disparate arguments in a free-ranging but at times haphazard manner. Generous signposting along the way creates more redundancy than cohesion.

The initial promise of a ‘textured literary and historical reading’ (p. 2) looks forward to two main lines of argument, one devoted to reading the Catalogue intertextually with Homer and other early hexametric poems, another focusing on its social and ideological outlook. Of these, the intertextual argument is significantly less persuasive. Allusions to Homer are identified sometimes on basis of formulaic language, sometimes on mere similarity of situation or theme. Even where these allusions are accepted, the significance assigned to them contributes too conveniently to a presupposed conception of the Catalogue as a narrative about the end of the heroic age. The historical argument begins on a more solid footing with detailed discussion of ‘middling’ vs aristocratic ideology in the introductory chapter. A poem devoted to wooing and marriage will likely reflect the matrix of social concerns that marriage entailed, and the projection of varied marriage customs into the heroic age is likely to reflect the state of marriage in an aristocratic milieu. Nevertheless, there is a feeling that O. reduces fundamentally charming tales to agonised negotiations of social anxieties. In the process he seems to demand of this poem the one commodity it did not provide in abundance – coherence. In the case of Mestra, for example, O. seems to interpret only the first part of the narrative, up until the girl's return to her husband Glaucus, and then must explain away the sequel in which Mestra abandons this husband, absconds with Poseidon to Cos, gives birth to a new son and then actually returns to her father. This is hardly a woman whose identity has been ‘fixed’ (p. 116) by marriage, as O. would argue. The driving force seems to be the poet's desire to integrate multiple versions of the myth, probably for the sake of establishing the genealogical line of Eurypylus on Cos. O. is quite correct that the Catalogue's presentation of Amphitryon's marriage to Alcmene reflects underlying tensions between bride, groom and father; but the same agglomerative tendency can be seen in the fact that the Catalogue records both Amphitryon's murder of Electryon, his elopement with Alcmene and his attack on the Teleboans to avenge her brothers.

Nevertheless O. does a great service in pointing out the social and ideological complexity of this poem. He has usefully set aside the idea that it consisted of tedious renditions of a simplistic ‘plot of attraction’. He has shown that it is fundamentally a poem about marriage – an institution that is, in any era, one of society's most fraught and debated, and likely to have been especially so at the time of the Catalogue's composition. O. draws attention to the shifting roles and dynamic metamorphoses of the women of the Catalogue, putting to rest the idea that they serve as nothing more than enticing objects for wooing and marriage. His intertextual readings, if not always persuasive, still give a sense of the rich associations that formulaic epic poems must have evoked in well-versed listeners.